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Poetry
If I Wrote 100 Poems
A poem about poems
If I wrote one hundred poems,
would one of them be good enough,
speak to someone,
scratch an itch,
or grace the pages of a book that
someone might read again
in one hundred years?
Would a poem win a prize or
gain a retweet and a like from that boy
I used to know, who leaned his bicycle
against my mom’s new car and scratched it,
if I wrote one hundred poems?
If I wrote one hundred poems,
would one of them be folded into a flower
and dropped down the barrel of a gun
in an act of defiant mercy
captured by a Reuters livestream
turned into a meme
and then one day, in a history class,
shown to bored tweens
who don’t know the difference
between a poem and a bullet?
Would this fear creeping up from my belly —
this fear that the whole world is on the brink
and all we can do is…