A Winter's Tale

I'm on a bit of a Shakespeare kick. I remember the first one I ever had, I was thirteen, living in a flat on Le Loi Street right across the street from Ho Chi Minh City Central Park, giggling at the antics of the two Antipholus and Dromios, coming out of my Bard-induced trance every few hours to run down to Ben Thanh Market and gulp down a bowl of hot pho bo or three fresh spring rolls. I never was big on the sonnets, though my favourites are ten, twenty-seven, and forty-two. I didn't give much consideration to the ones that were popular, and I still find that iambic pentametre is exceedingly heavy handed.
But I was in the shower this morning, thinking about sonnet twenty-eight, and I could only remember about nine lines. I dropped off starting from 'I tell the day to please him, thou art bright' &c. And despite not particularly liking that sonnet, I was a bit upset. I should have a better memory than this. I remember all the lyrics from the memory book tapes, and a song was playing the other day that I haven't heard since I was seven or eight, but I remembered it verbatim. In any event, last night I watched Much Ado About Nothing, and, despite Keanu Reeves' dolorous mealymouthed woodenness, I grinned and giggled myself all the way through. Alan Rickman should have been John the Bastard. He would have been just edible. Almost as edible as when he was Colonel Brandon. But I digress.
I was feeling nostalgic for the times when I had the leisure to read for hours on end, and emerge only for food and piano lessons. I miss the people in Saigon that I loved, and it's for them that I scrounged for this little piece of pensive brilliance, despite that it is gentler than my tastes in poetry run.

Sonnet XXX
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moon,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.
(finis)