Paul Christensen: The First Chill Air of Summer’s End
The village bar is still serving lunch on the weekends, which is welcomed by us as a way of entertaining without having to cook the food, lay in some bottles of wine, find a dessert or make our own pastries. We just come in, sit on the terrace, order whatever is the main dish of the day, and slurp some cold rose or white wine while we amiably chat with our invited friends.
Tom Engelhardt: The Decline and Fall of Everything (Including Me)
I find myself experiencing three versions of that ultimate story: that of my own fall; that of my country; and that of an increasingly overheating planet as a habitable place for us all.
John Lawson: Two Dreams
She is one of that generation the heroes fought
And died for, inheritors of prim suburban homes
Purchased by the drowned
Doug Anderson: What if I wrote a poem
About being seventy-seven
and trying not
to speculate how long I’ve got left
Rachel Hadas: Little Free Library, Turner’s Falls
Crones do not whine: agreed.
But pain’s a constant, and the need
to let it out, give it a name
shouldn’t be a source of shame.
Robert Walicki: The Ride
I thought my grandmother was a badass
after arm wrestling me for a pack of Swedish fish.
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
Skye C. Cleary: Simone de Beauvoir recommends we fight for ourselves as we age
Elderhood is an opportunity to turn to ourselves, to be more responsive to our own needs, and less obliged to other people.
Dawn Potter: Now that I’m old
now that I don’t have sex every night or carry two fat boys,
one on each hip, up small mountains,
I have to go to exercise class
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
Video: For Nonna Anna
As a young trans woman cares for her Italian grandmother, she discovers a tender bond in their shared vulnerability.
Vox Populi 