You didn't have to have struggled through
Reading Chaucer in Middle English
To understand this poem,
But it would help.
You likewise needn't to have read
An array of Emily, Stephens. Williams,
Sandberg, Bishop, Whitman, Thoreau,
Jeffers, Paz, Bukowski, or all of Frost.
It's not a prerequisite to have
Surfed through MTV, PBS,
The Three Stooges, Lucy, The Great One,
Chicago Hope, Ben Casey and NYPD Blue.
You didn't have to have been at the
Robert Kennedy campaign headquarters
In the San Francisco Fox Plaza
On the night he was shot and died in LA,
Nor in my college cafeteria
Across the room from
Where the Black students hung out
The day after Martin Luther King was killed
To know how I felt when
I turned on my TV 6AM PDT
September 11,2001,
But it would help.
Tom J. Mariani
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-our-own-image/
