3poems & readings

Retirement Poems

For the last day of work and the first day of everything else: poems for cards, speeches, and the colleague who actually read their emails.

Retirement verse has one rule: face forward. The card that lists past achievements reads like a performance review; the one that toasts the unhurried mornings, the garden finally getting its due, and the alarm clock's unemployment reads like a gift. Thank them for one specific thing — the mentoring, the calm in the crisis of '19, the way meetings ended on time — then point the poem at the open road.

For speeches, poets have done the heavy lifting. Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' is the perennial choice, but Tennyson's 'Ulysses' is the braver one: an old captain refusing to rust, declaring ''tis not too late to seek a newer world.' Read that to a retiring colleague and watch the whole room sit up straighter.