Golden Links In Golden Chains Poem by Michael Shepherd

Imagine – well, try to imagine -
what it must have been like
to a poet of, say,1480
in, say, Florence, that sounds civilised,
the day he (probably he) heard for the first time
while scratching away with goose-quill, copying
what used to be a favourite poem
which he’s now beginning to dislike
as he copies it for the nth time
in hope of getting it known –
imagine when he first heard
about this new invention called printing
which of course he couldn’t afford
but which held a golden possibility
of a brave new world of mind so easy shared;
imagine

surfing the internet which has been around
longer than – some of our children – so that
they might assume that Adam and Eve shared a laptop
with a faint scent of figleaves -
surfing the internet hungrily for intimate, telling details
of some, let’s say, poet-hero,
there’s now a chance, that like a heavenly shaft
of sunlight through the dark clouds concealing history,
you – I – hit upon some link; some interview; some audio,
that takes us deeper into that hero’s life
than ever we could have hoped for –

might we hope that such a heavenly insight,
such a golden link in myriad golden chains
might be, oh, a mere shadow of some truly heavenly
facility, truly heavenly experience,
that we may one (day) share?