Two Poems by David Lehman

Conventional Wisdom

Conventional Wisdom
is a great name
for a nation-wide magazine
as Newsweek proved
in its ad campaign, circa 1991,
which claimed it offered the opposite
of “conventional wisdom”
and inadvertently
proved opposites are equal.

Poetics

“Reading your poems,” you said,
“One would hardly know
There’s a pandemic going on.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the point.”