Bonnie Billet: The Last Surprise

It's late

some have died

            cancer

                       oxycontin

bad luck

nothing is set in cement

                  but the roads have been chosen

                  and walked almost to the ends

I have more than I 'd expected

                   a family

                  a mess of poems

                  written in my 70's

                  a lion colored dog

                  a sulphur crested cockatoo

the first roads

                        went to Paris

Istanbul                   New Delhi

Later we walked

                        into marriage

learning to ignore what couldn't change

we made a success of it

the last surprise is death

dying                   like falling into a dream

a few random thoughts

then nothing

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Bonnie Billet wrote until she was 35, she was published in Poetry, Pequod, The Kansas Quarterly, Oxford review and Cache.  She started writing two years ago and is now 71.  She has had a poem accepted by So To Speak.