Don’t let them tell you poetry is for the birds.
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(1919–2021, owner of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers)

But it is, Larry.

(Can I call you Larry? I’m sure I didn’t
when I interviewed you years ago at
your place—half bookstore, half writers’
shrine, bless you. Ever since I’ve
considered you a kindred spirit.)

Poetry is for the birds, if we call out lines
to them as they balance on sky wires
with their brethren, singing lines
back to us.

The wingéd ones I see sit on poems
every day, transmitting power
and voices (as good poems do),
communicating over miles and miles,
line to line to line.

Though I’ve heard that birds perch
there because the lines are warm,
I like to think that those little airplanes
of the heart absorb poetry through
their powerful clinging claws,

soaring lines, as you wrote them,
earthshaking lines by Alan and the Beats,
and you published them, Larry—
put them onto the page, into the world,
defended them against censorship—
you painted the city’s light.

And the wheeling angels still watching
over the bookstore, descendants of long ago
sky poets—how could they not carry lines
on their wings, words in their beaks?

Inside, people are still invited to sit
and read as long as they like. Outside,
on high wires, the birds safely rest, too,
electrons having no motivation to travel
through their small bodies.

Then, as if responding to a divine signal,
they wing away as you and your friends did,
trilling notes of poetry into the air,
leaving marvelous echoes behind.

(Quote from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Poetry As Insurgent Art” © 2007, New Directions Books)