The new issue of Measure

magazine features an essay by Seamus Heaney on Dylan Thomas’s legacy, interview with MacArthur Genius Grant recipient A.E. Stallings, and poems by Thomas Lynch, Lucinda Roy, Ernest Hilbert, Rachel Hadas, Richard Wakefield, Wilmer Mills, Bruce Bond, Tony Barnstone, and Andrew Hudgins. Here is my poem “Yggdrasil” from the issue. Click here to subscribe.

O, ungrateful hordes! Archaeologists
Mill through the hotel lobby, like jammed cars,
Clogging doorways, aiming all ways, vaguely
Swerving clots of unflappable classicists.
While elsewhere, their counterparts, undertakers,
Are busy burying, they burrow to see
What’s still down there. To think, such an awkward
Set of characters would meddle with tombs
Of emperors, queens, and epic poets!
They hunt all summer long the long interred,
Gather smashed shields, pry seals from anterooms,
Blow dust from sherds, dive to black ships.
Veering, talk to talk, they discuss ancient glory,
Building careers, then joining their quarry.