Trash Talk

A Poem by David Lehman

There is no right side of history
unless you equate victory with success,
itself tentative and temporary,
like Cromwell’s ascendancy
in the seventeenth century, short-lived
because the English missed
their monarchy. Auden’s
“History to the defeated may say alas
but will not help or pardon,” is, as he says,
a wicked doctrine if we expect our poets
to be truth-tellers rather than drunkards,
narcissists, bullshit artists, and echo chambers,
but what do we expect of our poets? Truth or diversion?
The poet, a born liar, sits atop the rubbish heap.

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Poet, John Hamilton Mortimer, 1775, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

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