The Sunday Poet: Bert Stern

Bert Stern

Bert Stern writes of himself, "Bert Stern is an old man who keeps writing.poems and learning to love."

After the Election

Dear Du Fu asks, “Does anyone like the poems I write

after drinking the wine of the rich?” Now America

drinks the wine of the rich. How can poems

get written at all? I know, I know, the dharma

is still the dharma, love, though it must lie low,

is still the fire that warms us, the sky, though

gray, hasn’t been jostled loose nor the sun

and moon and stars and earth out of their orbits.

Maybe the soot that’s fallen over everything

will one day wash away.

--Bert Stern