Shakespeare In Verona
You birds -, you toughs with claws and beaks,
broken like me by the light at birth,
you skitter over the stones and the ground,
and peck and screech. In this way, I inflate my work.
To high and low, I gave my fooling.
Even as, through injury, I spoke my piece,
it was theatre to those who came for poetry.
I exacted revenge with beautiful poisons,
and now this age inspects the pollutions.
Still, at the end of the corso Cavour,
in the tiny square just off the street,
so forlorn a nook with the yellow leaves
a gardener swept into lonely piles, I sit.
Here's the stunted palm, the bedraggled cypress.
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