Time of Singing, Winter 2011/2012

        "Eighty-Something" took second place in Time of Singing               Winter 2011/2012 Contest, "It's a Wonderful Life." 
          
                                         Eighty-Something
                                                             After "coming into Eighty" by May Sarton

                            
                               I think I shall live to be eighty-something--
                     I've seen how loath old poets are to leave.
                     Stick-figures in wind-puffed sleeves
                     staring down an ocean of words unsaid,
                     languishing for want of naming things
                     to others and themselves.

                     I've seen them piping like shore birds
                     on finding half-buried in the sand
                     a bottle thrown into a river at flood stage,
                     a bottle, for all I know, bearing the words:
                     Write the vision, and make it plain.

                     For all the times time has hurried me
                     I think I shall live to worry time along.
                     Already half-past the wakefulness of noon,
                     I'd like to live to sleep-in, sleep-off poems,
                     live until lines in my face story forth,

                     live long enough to give away whatever
                     to whomever I please and be the richer for it.
                     I'll say goodbye but once--and that at the gate.
                     You can, if you like, watch me out of sight.   
                                                                                        --BS