Freshly minted poem: "Oh, Alice"

 

Oh, Alice

 

Oh, Alice; what a writer you were,

but what a mother! Now we all ask,

can the one be without the other?

The family kept it secret to safeguard

your status; but in your grave now,

interred with your shame, the family

secret has lost its power, and is no more.

I loved Hemingway the writer, too; but

the more I got to know the man, the more

I wanted to hate the writer! Oh, Alice,

your daughter has given new meaning

to Papa’s ice-berg theory of writing,

prying wide-open your secret to Shelagh

Rogers that “Memoir is the facts of life;

fiction, the truth of life.” You also won

the Nobel Prize for Literature; but was

the game worth the candle?

 

Composed in Georgian Bay, Ontario

Sunday, July 14, 2024