April 2024
Author's Note: Here is a sonnet dedicated solely to the many extraordinary students I’ve been fortunate enough to have who are over the age of seventy. I credit the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Wisconsin Writers Association for continuing to provide me with that opportunity--and it continues to be more rewarding than you can imagine. I urge them all to keep on keeping on!
The Seventy-Somethings in the Workshop
Breathless in their quilted overcoats,
the silver-haired contingent now arrives
shouldering their zippered canvas totes
stuffed with recent cuttings from their lives.
They claim they can’t recall a single line
of poetry—but soon they’re reeling off
entire chunks of Frost and Gertrude Stein,
Millay, MacLeish, Penn Warren, Nemerov—
and finally, from three-ring binders, lift
their own bespattered pages, creased and smudged
with fierce self-edits— like a sacred gift
to lay before the others, to be judged—
while Pound and Parker, Bishop and Jarrell
smile down upon them, wink, and wish them well.
©2024 Marilyn Taylor
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