Last Friday Laura Willey at Laurable posted a link to an interview with Jane Yolen on NPR, about the sonnets Yolen wrote daily during her husband's radiation treatments. I'd heard the interview quite a while ago, but Laura's link sent me looking to see if The Radiation Sonnets had been published, and they have! On the way back to Maryland from North Carolina yesterday I bought a copy. I haven't yet had the chance to read it closely, but I'm excited. I once wrote a sonnet a day for about 3 months, and it was absolutely exhilarating, though none of those sonnets were as good as what I've seen so far in Yolen, and I'm going to do it again and post them here. They won't all live. Here's the first:
Progress
Nearly two years without two weeks together.
Just every other weekend and the phone
And email, driving and the endless weather,
And you and the kids alone and I'm alone.
Thank God I've cultivated inner resources!
I keep myself so busy there's no time
For pitiful poems or whiskey-fueled discourses
On life's unfairness when one's passed one's prime—
Which I, of course, have not. I'm on a diet—
Not that I'm fat, though I could lose a few—
And I look pretty good, you can't deny it,
Since I've dyed my beard brick red again for you.
And now we've got these web cams, you can see,
And so can I, just what we like to see.
11:03:32 PM
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