The Shakespeare Life

Note: Happy birthday, Michelle!  This poem is dedicated to you.

Tim Walker

Shakespeare penned plays about love, wrote verses
measure for measure that still remain the standard
for what we call romance

A romance of comedy and tragedy: a tragicomedy of errors,
where a rose that is a rose produces perfume and thorns,
both punctuating and perforating air and skin

Heroines (the "women") plot and pine, never fainting or fleeing--
instead, they march on with disguises and deceptions and decoys,
while the heroes (the "boys") fail to see truth until the very end

When reality is revealed, whether in kisses and marriage proposals
or poisoned veins and baked pies, all the world's a stage,
and a tempest of events is reversed or irreversible

There is no easy way to live as we like it through a Shakespeare play;
instead, life is a series of Shakespeare sonnets--bursts of love's
labour's lost, short midsummer nights and long winter tales

Much ado about nothing becomes something--but we can
only wait until all the toil and trouble slowly slips away,
and the sun rises again in the east, to a brave new world


Written: 4/25/10