Carl Glassman / Tribeca Trib

Gertrude Morris reads her work to herself before reading it to the group.

Beautiful, but frail, and barely able to speak above a whisper, Mimi Cavallo, 73, finished reading her poem entitled “The Voice.”

Either screaming
or crying
or yelling at kids
or perhaps making love   
The voice is necessary.

Then her eyes filled with tears.

To Hettie Jones, a poet and the teacher of this poetry workshop for seniors held in Independence Plaza’s community center, the tears were a good portent.

“It’s all bottled up!” she said enthusiastically. “If the poem is good, you’ll eventually cry. Guys included!”

And good poems they were. In simple, unembellished prose, the students conjured up the details, small and large, of their long lives. They pined for a mother missed, a love unforgotten, a child lost. They recalled rooms where they had lived, three-quarters of a century ago, and objects unseen for decades.

In each of the four workshops, sponsored by Poets House, Jones began by reading a selection of poems by noted authors. Then she gave her students a topic and told them to start writing.

“You have 15 minutes,” she said. “On your mark. Get set. Go!” 

On the first day, Saul Zachary, 74, wrote of the t-shirt bought long ago in Venice Beach that made him “feel young and carefree.”

And when it was so gossamer
As a spider web, I stuck my finger
through it. My wife said
“Throw it out!”
She didn’t understand my spirit was
going in the garbage with the shirt...

Gertrude Morris recalled her first room that “held but a few things.”

In spring, I could see an old tulip tree
in bloom, and the Bronx river,
like crushed tinfoil in the sun,
shining to the sea—a view
that hung like found art
in my east window.

“We hold on to our memories, good and bad, and often revisit them,” Jones said to her students, some who had been writing poetry their whole lives and others just beginning. “By the time we reach a certain age, we keep back more than we reveal.”

Part mentor, part therapist, Jones gently encouraged her writers to open up.

“Sometimes you get to something that you don’t want to write about,” she told a writer whose poem spoke about death, “and that’s a sign that you should be writing about it.”

“I haven’t heard anything mundane in these classes,” said Laight Street resident Nancy Rosing, 73, who writes poetry regularly. “There was something in each of the poems, something touching, a common experience, but said a little differently.”

Most of the students’ poems were serious, but Zaneta Zelon liked to add humor to her work. In one poem, she recalled ruefully seeing her image in a photo album.

Was that really me?
Brown oxfords on my two too-big feet
the hand-me-down taffeta gown
The duckling that all could see in a wedding album
That she will have forever for her memory.
Someday I’ll steal it
Someday when she’s gone
And then that awful memory
Will forever be gone and done.