Fine Wine And Great Lines Poem by Suzanne Hayasaki

Here I sit sipping wine
And reading Sonnet 59
Letting something my son said
Roll around in my mind
Like a sommelier sampling
An unfamiliar vintage.
 
In this sonnet Shakespeare ponders
What poets of the classical past
Could compose if they had the young man
He feels so enslaved to as their inspiration.

In turn, I let my mind wander
Along the ‘ifs' and ‘whens, '
The lengths and bends,
Of my own time travels,
To my own imagined meetings
With this man at once so timeless
And so much the essence of his time.

Even if our bodies were dragged
Into the same place in time
Would our minds remain entrenched
In the paradigms that shaped them?
 
Could I ever respect a carefree aristocrat?
Forever high on wine and his own noble estate?
Or believe a younger man my better
Simply because my father was a glover?
 
Did the conundrum of his humble birth
And his certainty of his own true worth
Drive him to extremes of ecstasy and despair?
And was that the necessary engine of his genius?
 
And does my own banal existence
With my modern confidence
And my independent income,
Which frees me to play with words
Without concern for a patron's favor
Or a publisher' admonishments
On what is profitable and what is not,
In the end prevent me from stretching
My own soul to its limits in search of the
Alchemy of Words that turns rhyming lines
Into Eternal Verse?

If there is truly nothing new under the sun,
And everything created is simply a shade
Of some ancient child, reshaped to suit new times,
Maybe the value of my painful labors
Is more in the evolution they push me through
Than in the poems that will die in their time
Like so many feeble creatures.