Fallen
Richard LeDue
On a page, words fall,
less valuable than loose change,
unless accepted
by a paying publication-
then the “p” in poem grows up,
and the poet vindicated
for dropping chemistry classes
to study sonnets written by the dead.
“Yet are they truly gone?”
muses a professor, who wrote
about the view from the plane,
flying over Chinese landscapes,
only to get a contributor’s copy,
eventually forsakened to the bottom
of a cardboard box during a yard sale
after the estate was settled.
