The Workshop

This poem appears in the Summer 2019 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

                                                    for David Berman

Not every second Saturday,
For sometimes you’d be travelling
Abroad, or work kept you away,
But ten months out of twelve you’d bring

A bull’s-eye-central metaphor,
Already flawless, to present
For our critique, having made sure
To say precisely what you meant.

How easily we might misread
Your absence here today. At court,
With one more major case to plead?
At anchor in a foreign port,

Where you’ve uncorked a vintage wine?
You would have joined us otherwise;
We’d quibble with your closing line.
But this is one you won’t revise.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”