Center for Journal Therapy
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Poem of the Month: January 2000

To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence I who am dead a thousand years, And wrote this sweet archaic song, Send you my words for messengers The way I shall not pass along. I care not if you bridge the seas, Or ride secure in the cruel sky, Or build consummate palaces Of metal or of masonry. But have you wine and music still, And statues and a bright-eyed love, And foolish thoughts of good and ill, And prayers to them who sit above? How shall we conquer? Like a wind That falls at eve our fancies blow, And old Maeonides the blind Said it three thousand years ago, O friend unseen, unborn, unknown, Student of our sweet English tongue, Read out my words at night, alone: I was a poet, I was young. Since I can never see your face, And never shake you by the hand, I send my soul through time and space To greet you. You will understand. --James Elroy Flecker JAMES ELROY FLECKER, English poet, was born in London on November 5, 1884. His death in 1915 at the age of thirty was "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats" (Macdonald, 1924).

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