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This poem is taken from PN Review 24, Volume 8 Number 4, March - April 1982.

Two Poems Iain Crichton-Smith

THOSE OTHERS

How can they survive the days,
those who have no talent
how can they face the sharpness of the morningstar?

Those who have no direction
who can do nothing well
whose days do not form a book

or even a particular style
such that it feeds on the clouds
and on the blue spaces between them.

Admire them most of all
those who built the pyramids
but were too close to them to see,

those who died
before the road was completed
before the bridge spanned the water.
...


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