“The Romantics,” a Poem by Maya C. Popa
From the Collection If You Love That Lady
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.
Maya C. Popa
Maya C. Popa is the author of American Faith, recipient of the 2020 North American Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Nation, Poetry, and the Paris Review, among other publications. The poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, she lives in New York City.
