Key West The Newspaper

Who were you, out there,
furnishing our home,
composing our music,
writing our books,
or you, strangers, anonymous,
who first wore my clothes,
broke in my boots,
provided my bibelots?
And who are you, now,
fingering my poems,
reading my letters,
discarding the irrelevant,
putting aside the dispensable,
dismissing what’s unessential,
burning up the obsolete,
rejecting the weak, the decrepit, the lame,
or on top of your deep heaps
of debris in their garbage pits,
throwing away my name?

Kirby Congdon