A recent study found that poems increased
the sale price of a home by close to $9,000.
The years, however, have not been kind to poems.
The Northeast has lost millions of poems,
reducing the canopy. Just a few days ago,
high winds knocked a poem onto a power line
a few blocks from my house.
I had not expected to lose so many at once.
“We’ve created a system that is not healthy
for poems,” said someone. Over the next thirty years,
there won’t be any poems where there are overhead wires.
Some poems may stay as a nuisance,
as a gorgeous marker of time.
Copyright © 2019 by Catherine Barnett. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 22, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.