A POEM BY ALFRED STARR HAMILTON

Since they officially made April poetry month, and even though poetry keeps me going and has every day of my life, in honor of the officials getting official about poetry, I intend to post poems and quotes and other stuff about poetry as often as I can in April, and I thought to start it off I'd post this poem by the eccentric and reclusive Alfred Starr Hamilton who lived in Montclair, New Jersey, in the last century (he was born in 1914 and I haven't looked up when he passed if the information has even made it to the web). Poet Geoff Hewitt helped get a book of Hamilton's poems published in 1970 by Jargon, one of the best small presses of the 20th century, from which I extract this poem:


A CRUST OF BREAD

why, I often wondered
why I was a poet,
first of all

most of all, I wanted
to have been a bird
if I could have been a bird

but I wanted the starlings
to have been fed,
first of all

—Alfred Starr Hamilton