18 February 2024

By Philip Kuepper

In the end, Keats wrote
Shelley’s epitaph, as well as his own,
with the ink of water,
pocketed, as he was, in the drowning poet’s jacket.
And the Ozimandius desert of a sea,
the savaging and the salvaging sea,
carried to shore his body,
as though in regret fate had decreed
poets become legislators
of the world of the deep.

(4 January 2024)