Literary Envy To The Grave Poem by Shalom Freedman

LITERARY ENVY TO THE GRAVE

I am not
Kafka Joyce Borges Beckett Solzhenitsyn Wordsworth Shakespeare
Keats Stevens Dickinson Melville Hemingway Fitzgerald Updike
Bellow Philip Roth
And tens of other writers
And will never be
Great in Literature
One in the canon
Loved and admired by readers
Interpreted and reinterpreted by scholars endlessly
I am not one of the ones I wanted to be one of
I will never be
I will go to my grave envious and disappointed
Because I am not one of them
I have accepted my failure already
But I can never accept it really
I am wise enough to know
This Envy hurts me
Is petty stupid self- defeating
And wholly useless
But I am not one of them
I will never be
I wanted to be so much
I gave my life in work
Striving to be among them
I will not be
I cannot be
At best I can be an example and half-baked consolation
To so many others
Who too wanted to be among them
Not tens not hundreds not thousands but millions perhaps
Who wrote and strived and tried
And like me
Will go down to the grave
Disappointed at never having becoming one of those
Literary immortals whose work will be read
So long as humanity goes on reading
And caring for those who have created in this way.