Sarah Yerkes - Days of Blue and Flame
One of the first women to earn a Harvard architecture degree, Yerkes, born in 1918, worked as a landscape architect and sculptor for most of her adult life. When she joined a poetry workshop at Ingleside and turned to writing in her mid-nineties, she found revelatory “how satisfying it could be to shape, build and form a piece with words rather than with wood, aluminum, stone and iron pipe.” In her first collection of poems, published at the age of 101, Yerkes writes about childhood, family, travel, aging, and art, remarking, “…what a host of memories I have! / I’ve seen such splendor one can barely grasp. /Never mind mortality. /The opulence was always built to last.”