Retirement Home

by Katherine L. Gordon

Not the pine and maple

red oak of sturdy stone home

with stained glass and fireplaces

that echoed man’s niche

in cliff-clad valley.

No leaves, trees, bird, bush

or river and forest dwellers,

not a fairy intervening Nature,

just the brick and chrome

of industrially ordained structure.

A virtual November

for every month one survives

in long halls with fake plants

shut doors and green-deprived vistas.

All the body expects without visceral connection.

I will decorate it with hair and bone,

all that can be encased without wind or water.

* * * * *

"Retirement Home" is from Katherine L. Gordon's new poetry collection Caution: Deep Water. http://www.hmspress.ca/deepwater.html. The collection deals with the shock of leaving one’s home for the cultural phenomenon of retirement homes, expensive ghettoes for the vulnerable elderly.

Katherine L. Gordon is a rural Ontario poet, publisher, judge, editor and reviewer, working to promote the voices of women poets around the world, as they are now flowering into acclaim.  She has many books, chapbooks, anthologies and collaborations with fine contemporaries whose work inspires her.  Her poems have been translated and awarded internationally.