Crossing The Equator

A wise man said: up to age twenty, all normal people are poets; between twenty and fifty, only poets are poets; past fifty, only madmen. Without entering into a dispute about the last point, I will highlight the figure: fifty. Mygeneration is traversing this line right now. Born between 1929 and 1941, between two great turning points, they were not in time for war but became the children of war; now they are crossing the equator of life: those who did not survive are crossing this line along with those who did, crossing it in their verse. An attempt at synthesis is natural: to understand the resultant quarter-century of poetic efforts and half-century of life.