Postcript On A Letter From An Editor

The impressive letterhead
tells its own success story,
nothing I would say will
ever be printed in two colours.
Is the presumption correct
that publication is the end
of the drive to write?
I think not to appear like
that represents a failure,
a kind of damnation, as
though one were setting fire
to oneself on a street corner,
to die and be remembered
not as a person but an event.
Is it any wonder then that
I fled to a bookshop to buy
the latest Penguin Modern
Poets as a reparation for my
sing of style? But poets are
more aware of their failures,
and that is why when emerging
from the darkness of Mason's
Lane to cross the Quay I
stumbled on the guttering it
seemed a logical conclusion.

P. F. Ireland