Carl Sharpe taught high school English for more than three decades and later taught writing for a few more years at the community college level. The founder and publisher of the online poetry journal VerseWrights (www.VerseWrights.com), Sharpe lives on the South Shore in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts where he devotes himself to furthering the writing of others and composes his own poems.
For Doris
The words I had at twenty are gone.
Old poems that made me weep
As I wrote them, amaze me even now—
But no one else.
And I can see you living
In your daughters’ eyes.
And I can see you gone
In your earth-love’s saddening face.
And I do not have the words, now,
To embrace how that feels for me,
Or for any of us.
But I loved you.
The dimmed, ashen suns within us
Struggle to regain their former lights,
Like the young words you asked of me.
Still, here is a last poem for you,
And for us who are left bereft, cheated
Of your joyous voice and roomful smile
Now blessed in the companies of stars.