☀ Today's Poem: "The Mayfly: May 12, 1864" Geoffrey Brock

"Local Cambridge historian Mike Petty said Withers was a contemporary of Byron and Keats—and was penning notes at the same time Charles Dickens was forging a career as a writer. 'These scraps of paper, handwritten on the back of bills and tax returns, are not only a record of a country poet—but a record of a county area, they are a unique snapshot,' he said."
via BBC

“'The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly' is a public poem in a number of ways, even if it doesn’t make any grand (or correct) statements about our immediate political situation or about anything that very many people really know or care about. It is a poem about a private figure who became a public one only after his death and only by chance. A poem about a work of monumental public art and about trying to make sense of that. A poem about race and religion."