Tag Archives: age

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Curtains’

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He draws back curtains on a winter’s day.
It’s eight a.m. A charcoal sketch of trees
confronts him. All the world is grey
and unappealing. Nothing guarantees
a lowering of spirits as do scenes
like these. He peers outside. The thuggish sky
scowls back at him. Of all his small routines
this is the worst: he knows that, with a sigh,
he’ll draw these selfsame curtains yet again
in no more than a few hours’ time, when night
comes slouching from its prehistoric den
and all the birds of fortitude take flight.
He is a detainee, his heart in chains.
Love is a star long dead whose light remains.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “Titles are often an afterthought in poetry, with first lines pressed into service as titles. For this writer, titles matter, and Curtains is a case in point. For those who grew up in the 1950s, curtains implied an ending, often death,
a sense reinforced by noir cinema. The poem Curtains treats the word both literally and symbolically: the daily opening and closing of curtains in winter becomes a measure of time passing and of life nearing its end.”

‘Curtains’ was first published in The High Window.

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/
or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com

Photo: “Good Morning, Sunshine.” by caiteesmith photography. is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Richard Fleming, ‘The Prayer’

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I remember the cold, high-ceilinged room
where they had laid him, the smell of incense,
brass coffin handles shining in the gloom,
an aspidistra, dusty and immense.

To this small boy dressed in a mourning suit,
he seemed reduced, much less than he once was:
his scalp, without his cap, bald as a coot,
his fingers criss-crossed on his chest like claws.

I thought back to the day we watched geese rise
high over wetlands blurred with morning haze,
the laughter always dancing in his eyes,
his warm, familiar smell, his turn of phrase.

Life is so short while memories are long.
We the bereaved are left with words unsaid.
At the day’s end, he’d sing a lulling song
as I rode his strong shoulders home to bed.

A prayer unbidden reached me on a whim:
Preserve in me the things I loved in him.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “This is a shortened, rhyming version of a lengthy free verse poem that I wrote over thirty years ago when I relocated to Guernsey from Northern Ireland. Like many love poems, the original version, The Hidden Traveller, has stood the test of time. This version stands as a homage to its source.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/
or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com


Barbara Loots, ‘A Note to my Old Age’

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By now you shall have counted out my fears
on many fingers, and I count them, too,
because I know I am already you
remembering myself from your old years.

How loved you were: your hands, your heavy breasts,
your laughter, and the secret talk of eyes,
the vivid mouth, the spreading lap of thighs
(beloved woman, warm and fully blessed

whose laughter lined our face with troughs for tears!)
I write this down in order to prepare
a kind of perfume for your sallow hair,
a kiss, a love song for your wrinkled ears.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “Following a form of Yeats (“When you are old and gray and full of sleep…”) I wrote this note to myself in my 30s. Now closing in on my 80s, I feel not in the least wistful or decrepit, still waiting for that imagined “old age”. With the perspective of some fifty years, I can say that old age is not at all as dismal as this poem would suggest. For one thing, my hair turned a rather dazzling white. And love faileth not.”

After decades of publishing her poems, Barbara Loots has laurels to rest on, but keeps climbing.  The recent gathering at Poetry by the Sea in Connecticut inspired fresh enthusiasm. Residing in Kansas City, Missouri, Barbara and her husband Bill Dickinson are pleased to welcome into the household a charming tuxedo kitty named Miss Jane Austen, in honor of the 250th birthday year of that immortal. She has new work coming in The Lyric, in the anthology The Shining Years II, and elsewhere. She serves as the Review editor for Light Poetry Magazine (see the Guidelines at  lightpoetrymagazine.com)

Dorothy Parker, ‘The Veteran’

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When I was young and bold and strong,
Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!
My plume on high, my flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
“Come out, you dogs, and fight!” said I,
And wept there was but once to die.

But I am old; and good and bad
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say, “The world is so;
And he is wise who lets it go.
A battle lost, a battle won–
The difference is small, my son.”

Inertia rides and riddles me;
The which is called Philosophy.

*****

Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967). The source of innumerable witty, caustic poems and quotable squibs. Her philosophical stance is one of Cynicism and Idealism; Socialism, Feminism and Civil Rights; and Literary American Modernism. She was wonderful.

Image: Dorothy Parker

Michael R. Burch, ‘How It Goes, or Doesn’t’

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My face is getting craggier.
My pants are getting saggier.
My ear-hair’s getting shaggier.
My wife is getting naggier.
I’m getting old!

My memory’s plumb awful.
My eyesight is unlawful.
I eschew a tofu waffle.
My wife’s an Eiffel eyeful.
I’m getting old!

My temperature is colder.
My molars need more solder.
Soon I’ll need a boulder-holder.
My wife seized up. Unfold her!
I’m getting old!

*****

Michael R. Burch adds the disclaimer “that the poem is pure comedy and my wife Beth is an absolute jewel. I’m lucky to have her. (Rodney Dangerfield put me up to it!)”

Michael R. Burch’s poems have been published by hundreds of literary journals, taught in high schools and colleges, translated into 23 languages, incorporated into three plays and four operas, and set to music, from swamp blues to classical, 75 times by 34 composers. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The HyperTexts.

“OLD old Man” by bixentro is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Using form: Villanelle: Rachel Hadas, ‘However Cool’

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However cool X may have thought he was
made very little difference in the end.
We are transformed as we approach the close.

Everyone is subject to these laws.
Ozymandias collapsed in sand,
however cool he may have thought he was.

We live in structures—marriage, job, or house—
steered steadily toward an unknown land,
slyly transfigured as we near the close,

additions and subtractions dealt by whose
enormous unseen hand?
However cool Y may have thought Z was,

her freshness faded like a poet’s rose,
malady no medicine can mend
disguising her before she reached the close.

Think of it as time; a veiled command;
a principle: I do not give. I lend.
However cool we might have thought A was,
we all are changed as we approach the close.

Rachel Hadas writes: “The villanelle ‘However Cool’ was occasioned by a conversation with a friend; she and I were talking about a mutual acquaintance who was ill, and my friend uttered a perfect iambic pentameter line which became the first line of the poem, as well as, with variation, one of the repeated lines.  It was fun to keep switching initials – the “however cool…” downward arc applies in different ways to so many people.

“A.E. Stallings has commented that villanelles are more fun to write than to read, and she may have a point.  At this point in life, I certainly find them easier to write than sonnets. But I hope there’s a bit of rueful fun to be had in ‘However Cool’.”

Rachel Hadas’s recent books include Love and Dread, Pandemic Almanac, and Ghost Guest. Her translations include Euripides’s Iphigenia plays and a portion of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus. Professor Emerita at Rutgers-Newark, where she taught for many years, she now teaches at 92Y in New York City and serves as poetry editor of Classical Outlook. Her honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and an award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters.

Photo: “cool for kids – summer holidays” by oddsock is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

RHL, ‘In the Spring’

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In the spring, an old man’s fancy
ruefully reviews his youth;
thinks of girls both past and present,
wonders can he hide time’s truth.

His always googly gardening eyes
all ever which ways scan and glower
at the bud-bursting blossoming girls
exploding in their flower of power.

What is this green and noisy growth
that’s flourishing, fresh and unkempt?
Old’s good, so’s young… could one be both?
O Fates! from fate make me exempt!

*****

‘In the Spring’ was published in Bewildering Stories, an online weekly of Speculative Fiction, Poetry, Art, etc. Thanks, Don Webb!

“at the museum” by derpunk is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: Quatrains with refrain: Jerome Betts, ‘Plus ça change. . .’

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If, as a child, he had a spreading rash,
The squitters, then, far worse, was constipated,
Or boasted big blue bruise and graze and gash,
A doctor murmured, “Yes, it’s age-related.”

When, in mid-life, and seeking novel thrills,
He got a dose of something best not stated
So had to suffer jabs and bitter pills,
A doctor murmured, “Yes, it’s age-related.”

Come his declining years, which tax most brains,
His wits would wander, now grown antiquated,
And while he rambled down his memory’s lanes
A doctor murmured, “Yes, it’s age-related.”

Until, one day of flowers and muffled peals,
Cause of demise at last certificated,
As up the aisle he rolled, worm-food on wheels,
A doctor murmured, “Yes, it’s age-related.”

*****

Jerome Betts writes: “Hearing a phrase new to you can start some process in the brain leading toa piece of verse. Here it was my GP saying of some minor ailment It’s age-related. It stuck in my mind, and I think triggered a recollection of a Thomas Hood poem, The Doctor, its seven stanzas all ending with the refrain Yes, yes, said the Doctor, / I meant it for that!, the dodgy physician’s unvarying response to reports of the disastrous effects, even death, of his prescriptions. Not long after, the sight of a hearse on wheels rather than on bearers’ shoulders entering a Devon church provided the idea for the last stanza of this essay in black humour which appeared in Snakeskin.“

Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, where he edits the quarterly Lighten Up Online. Pushcart-nominated twice, his verse has appeared in a wide variety of UK publications and in anthologies such as Love Affairs At The Villa Nelle, Limerick Nation, The Potcake Chapbooks 1, 2 and 12, and Beth Houston’s three Extreme collections. British, European, and North American web venues include Amsterdam Quarterly, Better Than Starbucks,  Light, The Asses of Parnassus, The Hypertexts, The New Verse News, and  Snakeskin.

Illustration: “Great Grandfather and Child” by Melissa Flores is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Richard Fleming, ‘In Grace’

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The present is arcane and strange
and any recollection left
of what has happened in the past
is vague and liable to change.
Of future plans, he is bereft,
for nothing now is hard and fast.

They give him multicoloured pens
and paper, as one might a child.
Familiar voices interweave.
He sees, through a distorting lens,
people who wept, people who smiled,
that, one by one, stood up to leave.

He is content. He lives in grace.
What matter if the moments blur,
if his nocturnal thoughts are grim?
He has escaped himself: his face,
a kind of absence in the mirror,
comforts and somehow pleases him.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “Getting old is like exploring new territory without a map: nothing prepares you for the subtle changes in body and mind. Is a moment of forgetfulness just that, or an early indication of approching dementia? We cannot know what strange highways a decaying brain takes us down but I like to think that they might lead to a place of contentment, where the burdens of age are laid down and replaced by some measure of contentment. That’s what I’ve tried to capture in this poem.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Photo: Richard Fleming post

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Sunny Afternoon’

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Book discarded, like excess baggage shed
by someone who has rapidly pushed on
into uncharted regions far ahead,
he sleeps in an old deck chair on the lawn.
Gulls circle, skaters on an ice-blue lake,
while he dreams on, oblivious, his face
unshaded by a hat which, when awake,
he wears with equanimity and grace.
What does he dream? Is the unreal more real
than those pale gulls that spiral high above?
In sleep, has youth returned? No longer frail,
does he relive time when impatient love
was everything and all his heart desired,
before life tricked him, left him old and tired?

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I suppose Sunny Afternoon reflects my own station in life, that is, drifting steadily towards the end, with the usual collection of regrets that most of us have.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Photo: posted by Richard Fleming