Forgotten High School Lesson Relearned

High-school-mandated Elizabethan slasher play,

a lousy father who raised an eye-plucking daughter,

and gave another daughter a name that to me sounded like gonorrhea.

Old King Lear, led by a fool, and all of them talked funny.

I giggled in the back row and hid my face behind the textbook.

I got a D-minus on the unit test.

So what? I passed

then quickly forgot that incomprehensible play.

But lately I've been recalling that third daughter, Cordelia.

How the broken old king held a mirror to her lips,

a mirror sterile of her living breath.

Though I have no daughters and need no fool to call me fool,

now each morning in my mirror

I see what Lear saw in Shakespeare's looking glass

and even further.

Yes,  friends betray and I grow old.

But my warm breath still  fogs the cold glass.

And beyond the mist my Cordelia is not yet dead.

Richard Fein