Ardor

No wonder ardour couldn't survive
the bullying linguistic fist of the Hero
of the Battle of San Juan Hill,
robust and lusty Theodore Roosevelt,
who also managed, upon becoming
the youngest and most virile President
of a young and expanding country,
to eliminate the u from the scents
of arbour, the necessities of labour
and neighbour, the cacophony of clangour,
the heat of rancour.
                     O Teddy, burly
bespectacled one, monumentally chiseled
into the granite of the mountainside above
the Badlands, see how the world has grown
harder to command than any Commander-
in-Chief could have imagined a century ago:
no Presidential declaration can alter the facts
of spelling — though it still can delete faces
that leave us with a last short o on their lips.

Roy Jacobstein
The Threepenny Review
Fall 2005

Copyright © 2005 by The Threepenny Review.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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