Welcome to Sunday Morning Lyricality, featuring a weekly song or poem by a Minnesota writer. Our current guest editor is Judith Feenstra.
With last week’s poem, we reviewed the aging process by exploring the fact that individual personal attributes determine, in part, how we approach and navigate the journey of our lives into old age. Many older adults find they have the strength and resilience to enter that new ground.
This week’s poem delves into the life-course perspective. This figurative poem, offered by a well-seasoned Fairmont MN poet, highlights the outcome of aging as being shaped by outside forces placed on the individual, thus reducing life’s choices.
Judith Feenstra
Pun-sai
Ed Brekke-Kramer
A little thing you think
in a pot
by definition
Evergreen sometimes
sometimes not
and with flowers
and maybe fruit
They are babies
for all the care
that they have got
They depict the old
when they are not
though some, it turns out
are revered because they are
But most of their age is
the shape of the masters’ hands
their sense of balance
and imbalance
the sweep of the wind
of your imagination
the tenacity of hanging
from a cliff for a century or two
There
quietly in an old pot
on an old table
alone
Writing Prompt, offered by Ed Brekke-Kramer
Consider something, anything, creative and beautiful, done effervescently or quietly, by human hand or otherwise, its tenacity and/or the inevitability of its failure in time. What does that something bring to your “here and now ” and what is most ephemeral about it?
***
Ed Brekke-Kramer (Mr. Ed) is retired from a career in public service in Minnesota. He is now beginning his third decade of assembling words in orders sometimes resembling poetry. His work has appeared in many, often ephemeral ways under one nom de plume or another but rarely in print – forums, artist collaborations, sign work and occasionally in contests. The work continues on a daily basis and in a weekly sharing with a select group of readers resident from the east coast of the US to Hawaii.
“Pun-sai” by Ed Brekke-Kramer appears with permission of the poet.