Roy Jacobstein

No wonder ardour couldn't survive
the bullying linguistic fist of the Hero          
of the Battle of San Juan Hill,
robust and lusty Theodore Roosevelt,
who also managed, upon becoming
the youngest and most virile President 
of a young and expanding country, 
to eliminate the u from the scents 
of arbour, the necessities of labour 
and neighbour, the cacophony of clangour, 
the heat of rancour. 
                             O Teddy, burly
bespectacled one, monumentally chiseled 
into the granite of that mountainside above 
the Badlands, see how the world has grown 
harder to command than any Commander-
in-Chief could have imagined a century ago: 
no Presidential declaration can alter the rules 
of spelling, though it can still delete faces 
that leave us with a last short o on their lips.


Copyright © Roy Jacobstein All rights reserved

Threepenny Review, Fall 2005
Poetry Daily