King Author Poem by Robert Rorabeck

If you said all my poems were very fine,
I would find your plot of ground where all the little
Children bored by their Sunday best tear about you,
Offer little unlined palms and finger-paint your stone;
If they had read you, at least, they would know
And the weekday pilgrimages to and from their classrooms
Would be less painful,
For they would have your words spread warmly on the
Marmalade page upon their laps like purring kittens of
Fine story, like butterflies resting like naked lovers on
Their corduroys, and the places you would reveal to them....
If you were not dead, and the lie of your author’s
Immortality beginning to slip off like an earlier coat of skin:
Overgrown, this world finds new if lesser refined sugars,
And the saccharine pleasures of the eyes no longer curtsy
Yet evolving to your fancy: I suppose, your words might live
Forever in the narcolepsy of sleeping beauties and
Social isolation each day as the grass whispers atop what
You really are- I keep in my mind, like awakening to a dream
Of better humanity, and I wait for other children to put
Down the delinquencies of saltwater taffy and come about
You like a mute prophet of verbose page, and lay about your
Stories as peacefully as lambs licked by fiery lions in the
Gardens of your fine and yet budding imagination.