'Gidget Gets Old' poem by Gail Israel

 'Gidget Gets Old' poem by Gail Israel

I request readers to read poem 3 of the 10 poems in the above link and then read my review. Thanks.

“Gidget Gets Old” poem by Gail Israel – the poem 3rd amongst the top 10 poems winning Writers Digest Awards for 2017

The poem uses the American slang for a girl ‘Gidget’ as the title because the 'gidget psyche' surfaces briefly within a woman in her fifties. Looks of a well built six packs young man arouses her sexually. She relives her thrills on such encounters during her younger days. In the first read a reader might wonder whether there was anything deep for a whole poem on this brief concupiscence. The ending stanza gives a clue:

you thanked me for my purchased

hoped my daughter would be pleased

with the jeans that I’d selected. Except,

I didn’t have a daughter and the jeans were meant for me.

Appreciation of striking looks of opposite sex and getting an arousal is not restricted to youth alone, as any professional physiologist or psychologist would confirm. Nevertheless, the instances of passionate encounters are rare for an elder, with a much younger person. As a person advances in age a distance develops between her and the younger generation, primarily due to the abnegation by the latter in any teaming or partnership, excepting business ventures. Nonetheless a beautiful and genuine relationship can transcend the age gap and sprout and bloom and fruit, the chemistry causes which might remain a mystery always. Only a context can tell us the cause for a craving in an elder for an intimacy with a much younger person of the opposite sex. In this poem we find the narrator’s traumatic loneliness is the reason for this arousal. She finds her spirits rejuvenated when she comes out for shopping and seeing people. She has none at home or in the neighborhood to look for companionship. A closer look at the narrator’s plight reveals she is not happy with the present phase of her life, that is, being unwanted. The escape from this agony is revisiting younger days when she was so much in demand. This is a layered and powerful poem.