My Favorite Poet and You Know It: Billy Collins

I love Billy Collins' poetry. It's easy for me to understand, and it's always funny, wistful, and poignant. Here's a sonnet called "The Golden Years" which Mr. Collins describes as a sort of a epitaph to those animals displaced by the ubiquitous, fast-sprouting gated communities of suburban sprawl in which human retirees go to...live.

The Golden Years

All I do these drawn-out days

is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge

where there are no pheasant to be seen

and last time I looked, no ridge.

I could drive over to Quail Falls

and spend the day there playing bridge,

but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail

would just remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

I know a widow at Fox Run

and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.

One of them smokes, and neither can run,

so I'll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?

I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

-Billy Collins