I’ve always loved her touches when in bed –
But now she touches to see if I’m dead.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, January 13, 2014
NOTE: “70+” just arrived. Must mean Nadja and “nature-boy” have another day to love and be loved in return.
The damn giants won’t stand still long enough for me to climb on their shoulders!
When I was 20 & they were 40,
I was never jealous of their success:
I knew I would catch up to them in time.
Now that I am 70 and some of them are 90, I doubt it…
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL
Why now, in my retirement, age 70,
have I a vivid dream of being at mid-semester
in a college American History class
and not even knowing when the class meets?
I dream I like the teacher, even the subject,
but I had been sick some, otherwise occupied often,
and absent always… I know I cannot catch up.
Where has the class been meeting?
Who will loan me their notes, and why should they?
Do I even own the textbook or have the syllabus?
The mid-term exam is over; the term paper
for the semester is due soon; the extra credit
readings form a mountain of unread pages;
I don’t know where the library is…
(Am I afraid of a Last Judgment
by God? Have I been truant from life?
Have I spent whole days with trivia, with trash,
with momentary pleasures?)
Then I dream of dying in a head-on car crash.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 2, 2013 having a bad night at 70 😦
“70”
When I say I have reached “Three score and ten,”
most folks today do not recall the phrase-
is from the Bible. Â They just think of when-
“Four score and seven,” Lincoln said, in days-
of war.
                          At six-foot-eight I was too tall
for drafting to the war in Viet Nam.
My college friends were sent to fight and fall.
I went to Seminary–just a lamb
far from the wolves, from death, from… Â (I almost
mis-wrote “…from Agent Orange”–for which no cure
exists–or rhyme.)
                                  I wish that I could boast
my years were spent in waging peace, in pure
activities alone:  but many a day Â
I failed. Â (It is for mercy that I pray.)
Steve Shoemaker at historic pulpit of Sheldon Jackson in CO.
Â
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, December 19, 2012
Views from the Edge 