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| Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of his iconic SF bookstore in North Beach |
"You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson... You can conquer the conqueror with words" -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)
Two guys made big news this week
They weren't politicians
They didn't use Twitter
They came from two different worlds:
Our cultural obsession and our oldest confession
Their names shared the same news cycle
Likely for the first time
One crashed in LA but survived
The other died in SF
Fifty-six years apart in life years
One was a golfer the other a poet
One question remains: Will the golfer
play again?
The poet will have his poems
read again, following a century
of thinking
Poets think, their tools are words
Golfers swing, their tools are clubs
Eldrick and Lawrence
Tiger and Larry
Larry put inspired thoughts on paper, made books
for writers called Beats, like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Snyder
He made a bookstore into a hangout in San Francisco
City Lights
He took a lifetime of hard knocks, war and study
found himself a pacifist insurrectionist
Became poet laureate of the city
Expressed lovely words that broke hearts
Struck nerves with simple twists of phrasing
Called writers to arm
Last year his adopted city by the bay cheered him
at 100
This week the national press revered him
an orphan, a captain, a publisher, painter and poet
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| Tiger makes his comeback at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades, 2018. PHOTO:KCS |
Tiger has traveled a different road, no less bumpy
still farther to go, he's being watched, every move
A prodigy so young, a star so bright, invincible
at his game
A man of color, beloved by the wide world
who knows him by name, the best ever
who's paid the price of fame, greatness and pain
Into the dumps he went yet came back again
Now deja vu
Another accident, another pin and screw to hold
together muscle, nerve and sinew
His adoring, hungry fans ask, can he, will he play once more?
Why can't he just be a man? Be himself?
He cannot because he's more than mere mortal
He is Tiger
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