That we would toast his birthday in a New World only recently discovered in his time?
Would he recognize our poems --
Free verse without rhyme or meter
Written in words he would barely recognize as English
And in other tongues quite foreign to his ears --
As descendants of the iambic pentameter he called his own?
Would the Bard lay down his quill and start writing poems on his phone?
I, for one, would like to believe that, yes,
What's past is prologue, as Will once said,
And that we as poets, tempest-tossed,
No matter how far we travel through space and time,
Will always find our words and our way back home.