Poetry Monday: Wish

 My lizard, my lively writher,

 May your limbs never wither,

 May the eyes in your face

 Survive the green ice

 Of envy’s mean gaze;

 May you live out your life

 Without hate, without grief,

 And your hair ever blaze,

 In the sun, in the sun, 

When I am undone, 

When I am no one.

 -Theodore Roethke 

 These days I tend to be hungry for the worn words of poets writing when they are older. They engage me for the obvious reason. But occasionally I recall a poem of my youth, if not by an absolutely youthful poet.

 I read this Roethke poem for the first time when I was 18, in the pages of a literary magazine in the college library during my first year. Although it is addressed to a young wife by a slightly older voice, it embodied in its words and cadences a feeling it evoked and expressed in me, surrounded as I was by lovely young women every day. I ardently wished this for them all. 

 When I took my first literature classes the following year, I would never have mentioned this poem, which would have therefore been exposed to the smirking charge of sentimentality. And perhaps it is sentimental and embarrassing. But now too old to care about that anyway, I find this feeling has lasted, from the day I first heard these lines in my mind and held them in my heart.

 This poem was in the queue for a future Monday, but I moved it up after belatedly learning of a death this past August of someone significant in my past. Perhaps the poem does not pertain since I have outlived her, though despite the recurrent health challenges, she had a rich, full—one may even say fabulous-- life. But in the end the poem is not about the life, but the wish. And it was always my wish for her.