Hey- This is my favorite poem in the world. I felt the need to share it with everyone. It is by Heather NcHugh


We were supposed to do a job in Intaly
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the mayor, mulled
a couple matters over (what's
a cheap date, they asked us; what's
flat drink). Among Italian Literati

we could recognize our counterparts:
the academic, the apologist,
the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib- and there was one

administrator (the conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated
sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was most politic and least poetic,
so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome
(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had writtend: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)
to Whome he had inscribed and dated it a month before.
I couldn't read italian either, so I put the book
back into the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomarrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant, and
there
we sat and chatted, sat and chewed.
till, sensible it was our last
big chance to be poetic,
make our mark, one of us asked
"What is poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables and
marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or
the statue there?" Because I was

the glib one, I dinentified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think- "The truth
is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was to easiest to say. WHat followed
taught me something about difficulty,
for our undererstimated host spoke out,
all of a sudden, with rising passion, and he said,

The staue represents Giordano Bruno,
brought to be burned in the oublis square
beacuse of his offense against
authority, whish is to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the univerese does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government, but rather is
poured in waves through all things. He is
the soul of the soul of the world."- Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him
forth to die, they feared he might

incicte the crowd (the man was famouse
for his eloquence). And so his captotors
placed upon his face
an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That's
how they burned him. That is how