David,
Thanks for getting us back on track.
If we could perhaps cork the politics genie, or at least move it to the General thread, that would be good too.
I agree with you about there not being a house poem here, though there certainly may be at other sites.
With the accessability issue, let me relate an anecdote -- unrelated to cooking or politics -- about my sister, and poetry night at the beauty pageant....
Some years ago, my sister (now a doctor) decided that she was going to enter the Miss Santa Clara County Beauty Pageant. The reasoning behind this is the stuff of another anecdote, but suffice it to say she did. One night, the contestants were asked to bring in a couple of their favorite inspirational poems to share with the other girls, for bonding and understanding where everyone was coming from and so forth. My sister mentioned that most of the other girls were kind of dumb (in some cases, very) and that she didn't want to bring in anything too much over their heads, so I suggested that anything suitable for a high school textbook would probably be simple enough for them but still not embarrassing for her, and she settled on Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken." She came back later and told me in horrified tones about the blank looks on the other girls' faces as she read the poems, about only one of them hesitantly figuring out the meanings, and everyone else reading this insipid syrupy greeting card stuff.
The point? Accessible does not mean good, and there are varying levels of accessible. Most folk here, while agreeing that the two by Frost are great poems, would also agree that they're pretty damn obvious as to their meaning and would likely consider them a gold standard of accessible -- though this was not the case backstage at the beauty pageant rehearsal.
I think it much more practical to write as wide a range of poems as possible and when someone comes into the library, hand them something to their taste, rather than falsely assume that understood by everyone is enjoyed by everyone.
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