Literary Envy Poem by Shalom Freedman

LITERARY ENVY

Not Shakespeare
Not Tolstoy
Not Kafka Joyce Proust
Not Keats Yeats Wordsworth
Not Hopkins Dickinson
Not Whitman
Not I.B. Singer
Not Hemingway
Not Bellow
Not even Philip Roth
Updike or Salinger.

Not any of the writers
Whose work I love and admire.

Not even the living names now
Who will cease to be
Names In Time.

Like the great mass of mankind
When I die
I will not be in the Consciousness
Of future generations.

I will not be.
I will be ‘not’.


I