BABY BOOMER SONNET

What Would Shakespeare Say Amidst this Chaos?

I love the sweet discipline of the form: the wonderfully specific rhyme scheme, the music of iambic pentameter, the three quatrains resolved by the chance for beautiful integrity in the rhyming couplet at the end. I love the tradition of it, the sanity of it, the unconventionality of daring to write in this conventional form when free form undisciplined rambling has made poetry all but unrecognizable.

And how apt it feels in this moment of global chaos to turn to Shakespeare for comfort (whoever one may conceive him to have been - I lean towards Edward de Vere, but let’s leave that aside for the nonce). The time is out of joint, as Prince Hamlet notes. Let’s face it, the time is so badly out of joint that the age itself seems to be tottering and careening headlong toward the abyss.

So I offer here my modest 2025 Baby Boomer Sonnet: the dizzying changes behind us and the fearful road ahead, seen in the light of that “divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.”

SONNET OF THE SIXTIES

I met the world as one of many souls

Born at the crest of generation’s wave.

The war had made us heir to glorious goals,

anointed now the threatened world to save.

Vast forests still stood then that now are dead.

Rivers ran pure that now are foul with slime.

A generation’s leaders blood ran red

Felled by hidden hands revealed by time.

Our music changed the world for one brief hour.

One brief shining moment come and gone.

The dying world grew verdant in that flower,

Before the stealthy dark could dim the sun.

But now the time returns, the songs revive.

Before we leave we’ll sing the world alive.

Look for it, my friends. We’re not done yet.

blessings,

Michael