"The Romantics" – A Poem by Maya C. Popa

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In raptures over Chapman’s Homer, Keats forgets

who discovered the Pacific—not stout Cortez

with eagle eyes but Balboa upon a peak in Darien.

Where he withdrew his handkerchief and saw

the death warrant drop of arterial blood,

a fate too deep for tears. Years, I was afraid

someone would refer to you in past tense,

and I’d sink like an animal past the dream

of evolution clean into disrepair. You lived—

this wasn’t that sort of tragedy. More like

a fairground after rain where heavy tents

had gauged large crevices. Franz said the silences

need to be loved, perhaps more than the words

that describe them in time. The dog cries

because it sets the human world in motion,

and I rise to stop the wailing, accusative at times.

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Excerpted from If You Love That Lady: Poems . Copyright (c) 2026 by Maya C. Popa. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.