A play’s last scene has often served as trope,
where theater, as metaphoric scheme,
enables authors to compose a dream
of Life as it exhausts its mortal scope.
The actors in our own Life’s play, we “hope”
and “love;” some “challenge fate;” some “sob” and “scream,”
but all personify Forever’s theme:
that with its ending, Life must simply cope.
I cannot speak for others in the cast,
but my bit-part as extra in The Show —
as son and father, husband to the last —
gave me such joy as any man could know.
I’ve lived a lucky life. Of this I’m certain.
So when my last scene ends, ring down the curtain.

*****

Michael Murry writes: “The background concerns the passing away of my 48-year-old son, Stuart Langston Murry, in a freak accident while visiting his mother in northern Taiwan. As part of the grieving process, I turned to reading some of my favorite poets – especially Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Dirge Without Music’ – before composing an elegy for my son’s funeral: ‘A Song for Stuart’ published as a Memoir in Bewildering Stories Issue 1032, followed by a companion sonnet ‘Anticipating Anonymity’ published in Bewildering Stories Issue 1042. So much for the composition’s background. ‘Inconspicuous Conclusions’ was published in Bewildering Stories Issue 1043.

As for the formal sonnet structure of the composition, I chose to use as a model John Donne’s Holy Sonnet (VI) with its opening “This is my play’s last scene” for metaphorical theme. The sonnet’s 14 lines consist of iambic pentameter (5 stress accents and 10 syllables) lines: 12 with masculine endings and 2 lines for the closing couplet’s feminine endings (5 stress accents and 11 syllables): ABBAABBACDCDee.

For relevant biographical information, see my website:  http://themisfortuneteller.com/  with my verse compositions under the “Poetic License” menu tab. Consider me a 76-year-old Vietnam Veteran Against The War – the one that never seems to end – retired and living in Taiwan for the last two decades. I started writing formal verse compositions in 2004 as a sort of DIY bibliotherapy for Delayed Vietnam Reaction. I haven’t stopped yet and see no reason why I should. You and your audience may find my work too polemical for most refined poetic tastes, so if you choose not to quote any of my verses, I will certainly understand. As you please . . .”

Photo: Michael Murry at Advance Tactical Support Base ‘Solid Anchor’, Vietnam, early 1970s.