He had woven out a net, had woven it
with the measure of his touch and tongue,
loose, exuberant, he had thrown it
out upon the width of day, had flung it
forth, had given to his time a tongue,
had worked had lived largely on this earth;
his emblems now are gone, his songs are sung,
the children of his listening. He is a songbird
caught in a net, its head hung down,
a stranger murmuring to himself, turbulent, unheard.
About Gwendolyn Jensen
Gwendolyn Jensen began writing poems when she retired in 2001 from a long career, first as a faculty member (in history), next as a long-suffering dean at several colleges, and last as a president, who she fears, occasionally made deans suffer. Birthright, her first book of poems, came out last year in a letterpress edition (with a second printing this year), and she has published poems in quite a few places, both in printed journals and online. She serves on the board of Off the Grid Press, a publisher of poets of a certain age (60+) and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, Gordon, and her dog, Abby. She and Gordon have two surviving children (they lost a daughter to breast cancer) and two excellent grandsons: one in law school, one in college.
