Does anyone know a nice/funny/interesting poem for a person who is retiring after 30 years of being a principal?? THANKS!

By Jenny Joseph

WARNING

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other peoples gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Les

Shouldn't the question be 'school' principal, to distinguish from other possible meanings of the word? Yeah, I saw your 'K12' designation, just being a wise guy.


What Fifty Said - Robert Frost

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past.

Now when I am old my teachers are the young.
What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung.
I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I got to school to youth to learn the future.


Poor Frost, having to use suture to rhyme with future, huh? Ogden Nash could have done better, I betcha.

Poor Frost my *ss

He insists on playing Tennis with a net !

and yes...Og would have doen something like...

You're the youth so I can't shoot ya
after all, you are the future

and while you're at it...Get off my lawn ya damn kids

Memo to self: read before cut-and-paste. Sb. go to school, not got.

When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past.

Now I am old my teachers are the young.
What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung.
I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I go to school to youth to learn the future.

What's that old saying, I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal suture?

Alright Hugh, here's some prose to make you think:

Sharon Basco produced this piece.

Labor Day has rolled round again, the holiday that celebrates work -- or the return to work -- with an extra day of rest, one more day of vacation.

I was speaking to a friend recently, and the subject of retirement came up. "I love my work," he said, "why would I want to retire?" And for some people -- especially artists -- their work is their life.

In his poem, "Lament For the Makers," Frank Bidart considers the human need to make art, harking back to the ancient idea of art as a craft, the product of hard work (the word "poet" derives from the Greek word for "maker").

Bidart takes his title from the title of the Scottish poet William Dunbar's extraordinary early-16th-century elegy for the poets he loved. At the end of every stanza, Dunbar repeats a phrase from the Latin Office of the Dead: "Timor mortis conturbat me" (which means something like "The fear of death screws me up").

Work, especially creative work, is one response to the threat of death. All of us work to keep alive; but poets, like parents, work to transcend death, to keep their names -- and their work -- alive after their death.

For artists, unlike animals, making art is a soul-searching process with a series of conscious choices. Bidart implicitly compares this work with the high-risk work of being a parent, another enterprise with many possibilities of failure. As an artist, he prays for the transformative power his parents never quite achieved, but whose attempt became his artistic inheritance. So his "lament" -- his elegy -- for everyone who tries to make something that will last -- is also a bittersweet celebration.


Les

Thanks. Here's the poem, I think. Two copies on the web, both of which separated the last section with an asterisk.


Lament For the Makers - by Frank Bidart

Not bird, not badger, not beaver, not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek

within itself what to make

My father's ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against a polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird, not badger, not beaver, not bee

*

Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.

Have patience. Someone will help. Some where in my bits and pieces box I remember a snippet that might work. I will have to sort through Papers!

OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO
by Dr. Seuss

I'm not kidding.

THE BEST reading for someone embarking on a new phase of life.