After we've had
  our age of gold
  and sung our song of brass,
  fingers will brush
  the age aside,
  fingers and leaves
  of grass.

Prompted by Thomas’s mention of Whitman…

A wonderfully understated poem - like all the good Imagists, Kreymborg seems to have mastered the art of saying a lot in a few words, letting the reader’s imagination and experience supply the rest. To explain such a poem would be both inadequate and superfluous; I’m not even going to try.

A few footnotes - the ‘leaves of grass’ is a reference to Whitman’s most famous work; you can find an online copy at
http://www.bartleby.com/142/index1.html. And for completeness sake, here are some reviews of Leaves of Grass:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman/works/leaves/1882/reviews/index.html

And science fiction fans can doubtless think of several stories that echo both the tone and content of the poem - Clarke and Bradbury especially come to mind.

Biography

Kreymborg, Alfred

Pronunciation: [krAm´bôrg]

1883-1966, American poet and anthologist, b. New York City. Originally one of the imagists, he wrote poems collected in Mushrooms (1916), Manhattan Men (1929), Selected Poems (1945), and Man and Shadow (1946). He chronicled American poetry in such works as the critical history Our Singing Strength (1929, 1934) and the anthology Lyric America (1930). His puppet plays were also popular.

– http://www.infoplease.com/ce5/CE028989.html

From a review of his autobiography:

Below is a book review, written by the poet and critic Mark Van Doren about a memoir by modernist poet and editor Alfred Kreymborg. Kreymborg’s book is called Troubadour (1925). Kreymborg, as everyone associated with poetry knew then, was for many years right at the center of the New York poetic avant garde–if not necessarily as a poet in his own right, then as a promoter of modernist sensibility and as an editor and anthology. He was co-editor of the modernist magazine, Others, to which William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore et alia contributed.

[…]

Mr. Kreymborg met so many people because he always, apparently, was at the center of things. When Greenwich Village was a center he was there, so that his life throughout one period becomes its history. As director in one capacity of another of the periodicals Musical Advance, The Glebe, Others, and Broom he touched hands with dozens of musicians, painter, and poets– particularly poets. As playwright and producer with The Provincetown Players and The Other Players he entered still another circle filled with names that now are magical; he caught more reputations on the rise. And whenever circumstances failed to throw in his way a writer whom he admired he went on purpose to see him, gathering material before he returned for the row of portraits which he now paints with so knowing a hand. If “Troubadour” survives as nothing else it must survive for its sketches–not lacking in humor–of Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Lola Ridge, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, E.A. Robinson, Harriet Monroe, Wallace Stevens, Maxwell Bodenheim, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. Of such–and indeed merely of such–have some of the richest of autobiographies been composed.

– http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/first-glance.html

Information on two of the groups he was involved in, the Others group and the Glebe magazine, may be found at the following sites:

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~slatin/20c_poetry/projects/relatproject/glebe.html

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~slatin/20c_poetry/projects/relatproject/arensbergothers.html

— Martin