Knute Skinner: Four Poems

                           Self-Assessment at Eighty

                (After reading Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography)

I spend the morning writing a poem. Perhaps it will go into a book. My

         latest, Fifty Years: Poems 1957–2007, has had welcome reviews.

In the afternoon I file my statements from Fiserv. My investments from

         retirement income are doing all right.

Shakespeare, in the closing years of his life, at the height of his fame, was

         semi-retired from the theatre but writing King Lear.

He had purchased New Place and had recently invested in tithes.

He was wealthier, by the standards of his day, than I am now.

His achievements, then as now, were beyond compare.

My advantage is that I am still over ground.

                                                                                    Knute Skinner

Boyhood Paths

One aimless Saturday we lost ourselves,

Dick and I, in a wood,

an overgrown path between hostile trees

failing…