All Minds Must Moulder Poem by gershon hepner

ALL MINDS MUST MOULDER

All minds when they start to age must moulder.
This is the price we pay for growing older,
and in the process all minds must forsake
their glory, like a mouldering wedding-cake.
Unlike a wedding-cake, though, mind improve
before age makes them moulder, and may prove
to be a greater treat, with the allure
of older vintages when they mature,
transcending taste of younger one like chateau-
bottled wines, so that the wedding gateau-
yes, even in its prime when wedding-nightly,
is put to shame, though it is less unsightly.

MArgalit Fox writes an obituary of Adrienne Rich, who died at the age of 82 in Santa Cruz on 3/27/12 ("A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism, " NYT,3/29/12) :

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique, " did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women's lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women's disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.
For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets….
Once mastered, poetry's formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, " published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women's letters: "The Feminine Mystique" was also published that year.
In the collection's title poem, Ms. Rich chronicles the pulverizing onus of traditional married life. It opens this way:
You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time....
Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact.

3/29/12 #9722