Sick Poet

I talked to an old friend the other day, and, I’m not sure how we got onto this topic, but we had a nice discussion about writing sick day excuse notes for our kids. I’m thinking that I never wrote one. My wife must have written them. Shame on me for not knowing. But my friend remembers writing the excuse notes for his kids. In fact, he told me that he occasionally wrote the notes as poems describing his kids’ illnesses. (You can’t make this stuff up.) I didn’t ask him if he brought up the topic at parent teacher conferences. “So, like, what do you think of my poetry?” 

I wonder if any famous writers or poets got discovered this way. Did Keats have sick children? Sandburg? Whitman? Maybe I should have written those notes back in the 90’s…