Out of a Cloud

Continuing our Poetry Month postings, here's another first-rate poet who happens to have been a woman (I'm not falling into that "woman poet" locution ever again...no one calls T.S. Eliot or Whitman "America's greatest man poet"!):

Several Voices Out of a Cloud

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit, to whom
and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless
And it isn't for you.
—Louise Bogan