Free Verse · Love
The Load-Bearing Years
The first year gets champagne.
The fiftieth gets gold.
But these — the middle years,
the school-run, leaky-faucet,
fall-asleep-mid-movie years —
these are the load-bearing ones.
No one applauds them.
So I will: to you, to us,
to every unphotographed day
we chose this. And chose it again.
Original poem © QuillOak — personal sharing is permitted.
“The Load-Bearing Years” by The QuillOak Editors — quilloak.com/poems/the-load-bearing-years
Quick facts
- Poem
- The Load-Bearing Years
- Poet
- The QuillOak Editors
- Length
- 10 lines
- Form
- Free Verse
- Themes
- Love, Life
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 10 lines · one 10-line stanza
- Line length
- Lines run 5-8 syllables (median 7). No single length dominates, which is normal once elision and contraction are in play.
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Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Original QuillOak text. Personal sharing is permitted; other reuse requires permission.
- Author record
- The QuillOak Editorstoday
- Source record
- QuillOak originalThe Load-Bearing Years, authored for QuillOak by The Quillery
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 06960defb234acdb…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.
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