Keats Walking
by Winchester Cathedral
down cobblestone paths
and streets, past Westminster
School, the divided river
mechanically leveled to
avoid overflowing,
past uncultivated fields,
low-lying meadows and marsh,
taking the air, writing in-comparable
verses, barely out of his teens,
intimations of immortality,
so many years before posted:
signs: DO NOT FEED
THE FISH, DO NOT SOIL
THE GRASS, DISPOSE OF
LITTER PROPERLY,
signs of a modern age,
warnings left out of modern
watercolors, painted as tourists
walk alongside the Itchen,
past Spartan monks quarters
of Hospital of St Cross; eventide,
a ghost dance for the dead,
who reside among the living.
Alan Catlin has been publishing since the seventies; from the mimeos to the Internet. His latest full length book of poems is “Alien Nation.” He is currently working on a sequel to that book under the working title of, “Beautiful Mutants.”