I have a number of friends who are writer/poet/musicians like myself. Dan Erickson is one such friend. For my daily offering for National Poetry Month I choose to share the following piece from his personal blog. It was originally posted on April 21st. You can find the poem on his blog here.

in good company

Imagine a world without chicken soup,

where cooking is joyless. Imagine a

world with no rules of order,

no elements of style. Imagine a world

in which Peter Rabbit and Huckleberry

Finn never existed in word or

imagination. Imagine a world

with no “Leaves of Grass.”

 

The “self-published” have often

been looked upon as less than writers,

sneered at by a snobbish industry.

They’ve been rejected, accused, ignored

and left to rust. They’ve been treated

with disrespect, disdain, and dismissed

as amateurs.

 

I know.

I was once told,

“Your story is splendid, but we have no

room on our shelves.”

Splendid? Indeed!

It’s a harrowing tale of rape and child abuse.

The critic never read a page.

 

Stories survive. Survivor’s stories live on.

Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg,

James Joyce, Steven Crane, Edgar Allen Poe,

Walt Whtman, Ezra Pound, Henry David Thoreau,

Thomas Paine, and Virginia Wolff,

just to name

a few.