On Changing Careers Late in Life (May 30, 2018)

Can you turn from argument to silence,

From standing up to speak out, to fence

With adversaries?  Can you walk the road

From banks and firms and work for pay to load

The heaping store of a life's long learning

Into the minds of youth filled with yearning

For a different life, life not of the mind?

Can you salvage treasure and try to find

The still point at the center of the room?

This is the summum bonum, the bridegroom

Who finally finds his bride.   To wax and wane

But once, then drift and dwindle, still so sane

That when you disappear you feel the rush,

See the point of light fade, hear the last hush.

On Reading Within a Budding Grove (May 29, 2018)

Marcel wrestling with Gilberte… good gracious,

The honesty of Proust!  The will to shame

Dissemblers!  A mind like that, so spacious,

So forgiving of things we dare not name,

So tolerant of sin, so just, so fair,

As if for years he suffered every pain

So later he might understand and care

About the pain of others.  He was sane

While friends and family thought him raving mad.

He was watching, waiting, learning, weeping

For the ugly, the beautiful, the bad

And the good.   At night while she was sleeping,

He was writing.   It takes courage to hold fire,

To hide your truer self behind a liar. 

On Memorial Day (May 28, 2018)

In Flanders Field the British dead were left

To molder in summer's sun.  Red poppies

Grew in earth turned by shells.   Mothers, bereft,

Wept in London.  Paperboys hawked copies

Of the Daily Mail with "YPRES AGAIN!"

Across the head.  The politicians talked.

Boys in knickers still at school dreamed of when

They too might fight the Hun.   John Keats once walked

In fields of flowers listening for a bird

To call him back to something close to peace;

Wan, weakened, waiting for a single word,

To end a single line, he tried to cease

The ceaseless war against the waste of time.

But soldiers know such wars aren't fought in rhyme.

On Sitting on the Porch on a Sunday Morning (May 27, 2018)

The cool of the morning before the heat

Of the day is more a sanctuary

Than the deepest kind of hermit's retreat.

Remove your shoes, you voluptuary,

And feel the cool of the polished brick floor,

Sit still beneath the low, slow-turning fan,

Relax, listen to Louis Armstrong roar,

A song of the self-made man, the whole man:

I see trees of green, red roses… you know

The rest.   A man might riot, rage and roam,

Chasing fame and fortune, becoming beau

To a queen.   Another man stayed at home,

Listening to the leaves as the breeze swirled:

I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

On Thanking My Wife for the Gift of My Daughter on Her Graduation Day (May 26, 2018)

The luck to be in the right place when she

Walked in, at the right time to catch her eye

From across the room.  He charmed her, that "he,"

That younger man, that younger, better "I."

In an instant, that wink, that nod, then talk,

And our talks became a daily blessing.

Who could have known (but God) when she would walk

Across the floor we soon would be guessing

Each other's fondest, deepest, heartfelt dreams,

That we would be each other's saving grace?

Now a quarter century later seems

Only a moment.   That face, that sweet face,

From that the greatest gift I have began:

This beautiful child, this angel, this Anne!

On Contemplating 60 (May 25, 2018)

To contemplate sixty is somewhat sad.

Gray jowls loom, flesh cascading down sad cheeks,

Forehead floating like a fat balloon, mad

Vessel for a mad man's airy thoughts.  Weeks

Might pass, then months, then years, the rest a blur,

The promised ease a rush to easeful death.

Sixty becomes seventy becomes… "Sir,

Can I help you?  Sir, can you catch your breath?

Are you all right?   Would you like to sit down?"

Lord Tennyson once wrote an old man's rhymes:

A man who would not yield, who would not drown,

But sailed to find the undiscovered climes.

"'Tis not too late to seek a newer world,"

Said old Ulysses.  You?   Your flags are furled.

On Beginning Another Quixotic Enterprise (May 24, 2018)

The year of sonnets will pass without note,

"Nor long remembered," as Abe Lincoln said.

Your hope would be the rhyming words you wrote

Might someday be heard, exhumed like the dead

From electronic mausoleums filled

With bits of wisdom.   But no.   You hid your lights

Too long under bushels.   But no.  You killed

Your best self by wasting your days and nights

Clicking on politics, the yin and yang

Of leeches, rent seekers, the right and left

Lickspittles, licking left, then right.  You sang

Of nothing and now you are left bereft,

The anonymous man, the minor man,

Paterfamilias of a small clan.

The Year of the Sonnets

It occurred to me on Wednesday, my fifty-ninth birthday, that the last year before I turned 60 years old ought to be one where I do something entirely quixotic, something so foolish that people will think I've run mad in my dotage.   On the other hand, since it is not in my nature to run mad -- if I have failed in my first six decades, it has almost always been from being too sane, too unwilling to risk any injury, whether physical or financial -- I'm not going to take up skydiving or suddenly cash out the 401k to start bitcoin mining.   So I needed something that would be both silly and safe.

Hence... the Year of the Sonnets.