I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all. Chance in Sweet Bird of Youth
Prompt: Write a poem about Time. Do you agree with Chance in Tennessee Williams’ play that Time is the enemy in us all? Maybe you disagree, seeing Time in a positive light. After all, we hear that Time is a great healer, for example. On my 70th birthday, I wrote this poem, a haibun, about time, not my usual serious poem. Enjoy. (And if you’d like to know more about the haibun, here is a wonderful podcast at Rattle, Episode 72 on experimenting with this form.)
On Turning Seventy
—after Egon Schiele’s Standing Woman in Red (1913); with lines
from Sidonie Gabrielle Collete and William Shakespeare
In less than a week, one doctor recommended a statin drug, another ordered
a liver ultrasound, and still another wanted a follow-up mammogram. I began
pondering Polonius when Hamlet derided him with his apt and
not-so-funny description of old men—gray beard, wrinkled skin, weak legs,
a deteriorating brain, sap-filled eyes. I started wondering if the old man
might have been approaching his seventh decade, too.
And then there was a friend’s birthday card with its cautionary fashion rules
for those of us in our golden years—don’t sport both bifocals and a nose ring
at the same time; or dentures with a tongue piercing; or liver spots with a tube
top. What are we septuagenarians to do with all these don’ts, the news
so disheartening?
Nothing to do but look to the wisdom of others. To be astonished
is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly. Yes! That’s it!
I am resolved. I am heading to the tattoo parlor, then on to Victoria’s Secret
for skin-tight fittings in fiery-red. If I don’t succeed in astonishing myself,
perhaps I will shock my world.
The Fountain of Youth
A chance to rid self
Of this hideous winter