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"Pink Shirt"
by
Nancy Shaver
He wore a pink shirt without a collar
When he sailed into view
Up the steps of the summer cottage.
I didn't remember the color of his eyes
Even after seeing him for weeks.
His first words made me smile
But I don't recall what he said exactly.
We moved in together the next month.
Forty one years later I see the pink shirt
Although his hospital gown is blue
He sleeps and shivers sometimes.
I know the color of his eyes now
And the pattern of his breathing
Even after it stops.
About the Author
Nancy Shaver is an English major (with the requisite rejection notice from the New Yorker) who has been successfully disguised as a marketing consultant for many years. Her two amazing grown up children are at work saving the world. She resides in Portland, Maine with her art collection and her beloved sea captain who is her grand passion.
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Bed of Roses Love Sonnet Contest Winner
Finalists
In Garrison Keillor's latest book, Lake Wobegon native Margie Krebsbach dreams up the idea of a trip to Rome, hoping to get her husband Carl to make love to her — he's been sleeping across the hall and she has no idea why. She finds a patriotic purpose for the journey. A Lake Wobegon boy, Gussie Norlander, died in the liberation of Rome, 1944, and his grave, according to his elderly brother, Norbert, is in a neglected weed patch near the Colosseum...
It's a story of Wogegonians in a strange land, telling stories of kinship and self-revelation — all delivered with Keillor's trademark humor.
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From Garrison Keillor:
“When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorize Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. 29, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state’ for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth. The sonnet is a durable good. These 77 of mine include sonnets of praise, some erotic, some lamentations, some street sonnets and a 12-sonnet cycle of months. If anything here offends, I beg your pardon, I come in peace, I depart in gratitude.”
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