I Steal Pencils

I don’t know if Keith Franklin is a great poet or no. But I know that he is a born poet. Anyway, he wrote at least one poem that deserves to be included into any anthology of contemporary American poetry. In this poem Keith Franklin confesses that since childhood he liked to steal pencils. It means that subconsciously he was trying to create his own rainbow. What is this rainbow? It is a symbol of the diversity of life. It is a symbol of the human right to possess all the colors given to us by eternity. Inside our mothers, not yet born, all of us are lying down like new unsharpened pencils in their tender, warm, breathing pencil-boxes. Some of us unfortunately are doomed to use only our own self-eraser, fixed at one tip of the pencil’s body with a little metal ring. Only the strong artists are able to sharpen the opposite tip of pencils and create with a colorful graphite, liberated from the wooden pencil’s body, their own rainbow, not stolen from others. Keith Franklin belongs to this stubborn breed of artist. — Yevgeny Yevtushenko