Poem of the Day: ‘Absentee Ballet’

Playing on the similarity of “casting a ballot” (submitting a vote) and “casting a ballet” (hiring dancers for a production), Boris Dralyuk (b. 1982) writes a sonnet about the showtime of his life. It’s a Shakespearian sonnet (three quatrains and a couplet) with a slightly irregular rhyme scheme, each quatrain differently arranged: abab ccdd effe gg. And along the way it builds a surreal sense of aging as an ever-enlarging ballet production: the dancers milling, the curtain dropping, and through it all the strange sense of the absentee ballet promoter.