Jim Daniels: Strawberry
the final time I saw my mother
she was trying to find
the last strawberry on her plate
Alison Luterman: At the Jeweler’s Tent
I hold a string of amethysts up to my collarbone.
There are wrinkles on my neck now,
rings of crinkled flesh like tree-markings,
one for each lived year
William Butler Yeats: After Long Silence
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
George Drew: On Another Epic Trip Around the Sun
I was sixty and I was dancing with Jan,
my brother’s Queen of the Line Dance wife
George Drew: The Poem about the Beatles (with video)
This is the poem about the Beatles that
I never wrote, and now there are more
yesterdays than tomorrows
Gerald Fleming: Work
Today you’ll work in the room behind the barn. For years there’s been a stain on the sheetrock where the rain drips in, and the place smells of rot, and when the other day you yanked off a chunk of sheetrock, thinking might be rotten wood in there, thinking you’d maybe have to replace a few studs, you found, in that damp place, everything rotten.
Sydney Lea: How-to for Older Age
you won’t know that squall in the soul
as when you pondered your place in the world.
Whatever that was, now is.
Rachel Hadas: Screen and Dream
It wasn’t a dream, but the experience was dreamlike: across the computer screen, one day last week, a photograph of my father, sent by some well-meaning distant acquaintance, flashed without warning. In this black-and-white photo, Moses Hadas is sitting at the desk in his office…