I wrote the following poem about the survivors of Gilligan’s Island a few years ago. As 2021 begins, only Ginger is left.

Castaways, 1964

Who can forget Gilligan – year after year
he and his motley crew

our after school companions, in black and white
then color, two-dimensional yet

more vivid than old classmates
in the reruns of memory.

And the actors died one by one,
each a strike of childhood’s death knell:

Jim Backus, Alan Hale Jr., Natalie Schafer
Bob Denver. Now, even the professor is gone,

no one left but Ginger and Mary Ann,
castaways of time’s inexorable shipwreck.