TO THE VERMONT ARTS COUNCIL ON ITS FORTIETH BIRTHDAY

When I was forty    everything

was all right    it’s true our children

with their ears to the pavement

were about to become that famous

city’s generation    our neighborhood

noisy with their energetic global

intention    then in the very heart

of the prime of my life (as it was

called) the American War in Vietnam

(eight thousand miles away) entered

the newspapers

luckily artists and poets and

musicians were wide awake due to

their peculiar antennae    for instance

the poets on trucks    in churches had

already heard the voice of Vietnamese

children and the mural makers had seen

even before the photographers the

curious bombs like bouquets called

cluster    they painted the story that

the poets and musicians sang

as we say    that was then this is now

and we are here to congratulate

the Vermont Arts Council which

had the Vermont sense and aesthetic

energy to be born forty years ago

and finds itself as I did then

in the prime of life with another

American war with an unknown people

thousands of miles away luckily

Vermont the United States and the

Arts Council is deep in poets    most

of us with big mouths    (it is said)    even

                                                             the gentlest