I Wish

I wish I’d gone to Iceland
with Auden and MacNeice
to feed my brain on silence
or talk of war and peace.

I wish I’d seen Craiglockhart
under a Scottish moon
and talked about the slaughter
with Owen and Sassoon.

But I was a Belfast student
with Heaney and his clan.
I never got to talk at all
–one had to be a man.

As the US decides, so can you

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