You Modern Folk

In The Flame, Leonard Cohen’s posthumously published collection of late lyrics and poems, I came across this lone stanza:

and Nico was blonde

and Dylan was found

in a pit he alone had descended

and there he unfurled

for the sake of the world

the bright flag so long undefended.

Drafted into one of Cohen’s notebooks, the passage leaves a strange aftertaste, like a question not quite asked.