You didn't have to have struggled through <br />Reading Chaucer in Middle English <br />To understand this poem, <br />But it would help. <br /> <br />You likewise needn't to have read <br />An array of Emily, Stephens. Williams, <br />Sandberg, Bishop, Whitman, Thoreau, <br />Jeffers, Paz, Bukowski, or all of Frost. <br /> <br />It's not a prerequisite to have <br />Surfed through MTV, PBS, <br />The Three Stooges, Lucy, The Great One, <br />Chicago Hope, Ben Casey and NYPD Blue. <br /> <br />You didn't have to have been at the <br />Robert Kennedy campaign headquarters <br />In the San Francisco Fox Plaza <br />On the night he was shot and died in LA, <br /> <br />Nor in my college cafeteria <br />Across the room from <br />Where the Black students hung out <br />The day after Martin Luther King was killed <br /> <br />To know how I felt when <br />I turned on my TV 6AM PDT <br />September 11,2001, <br />But it would help.<br /><br />Tom J. Mariani<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-our-own-image/
