On Retirement: 75 poems eds. Robin Chapman and Judith Strasser 2007

The editors of this volume are two women (a professor and a radio producer) who retired in their 50’s and began a practice of daily morning walks.  One day they realized that a huge wave of baby boomers were heading for retirement and were about to face the unnerving question, “What do we do next?”  When it occured to them that some of these people must be poets, they decided to collect poems about retirement being careful to “balance the pleasures of retirement with the indignities of aging and death itself”. The resultant volume has all the strengths and weaknesses of the themed poetry book with some great poems and lines and some duds.

I came across one of my very favorite poems of all time, William Stafford’s “You Reading This Be Ready” which is enough reason for owning this book.  Stafford writes:

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

And then there’s this wonderful final stanza from George Bilgere’s “Unwise Purchases”:

She and I will stand in the steamy kitchen,/fixing up a little risotto,’Enjoying a modest cabernet/While talking over a day so ordinary/As to seem miraculous.”  Wow!

There are other wonderful poems: Meg Barden’s “Reaching Eighty”, the entirety of George Bilgere’s “Unwise Purchases” , Philip Booth’s “Pairs”, and Lucille Clifton’s “climbing”.   I’m going to include several of these in The Poetry Tree on the Charles section of the monthly update, so check there to find some exceptionally lovely and thought-provoking poems from this volume.