THE BARD

Without a peer
or Oxford chair
in history or drama
words his only grammar

We have a tiny folio
that presumes to know you
in plays of braggadocio
from your Globe days bio,

We love Lear and Othello
and meditate with Hamlet
but above all we memorize
with Vendler your sonnets*

Enough of didactic verse
that we nurse or fear
and the critic's curse
my Will Shakespeare.


*BZ attended Helen Vendler's courses.
She liked his poems, especially on Auden.
If BZ wasn't so shy he would have kept
up a friendship.