Today’s prompt for Writer’s Digest Poetic Asides poem-a-day challenge is to write a poem of regret, but the word “regret” does not have to be in it.
“Books Unmet”
Jane Austen, her Pride and Prejudice,
Sense and Sensibility, next to
Charles Dickens, with his Hard Times and his
Little Dorrit, akin to T.S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hollow
Men, which looks askance at the silly
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
penned by Stephen Leacock that snugly
sit by Allan Bloom, his treatise The
Closing of the American Mind
hard by John Ralston Saul, his essay
Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship
of Reason in the West squeezing the
new gal Susan Musgrave with her book
Cargo of Orchids against the strong
side of smooth-sanded honey pine plank,
all of their pages straight, their covers
flat, their spines uncreased, they await me.
