How fares it?

Thigh-bone said to breast-bone:
      “How fares it, dead,
now heart’s soft hammer
      is silencèd?
How fares it, brother,
      when the only sound
is slow roots thrusting
      into the ground?”
Breast-bone said to thigh-bone:
      “How fares it, friend,
with no errands to run,
      no knee to bend?
How fares it ghost, now
      the only stir
is of quiet becoming
      quieter?”
Thigh-bone and breast-bone
      said to skull:
“What of dead Plato
      and the Greek trull?
How fares it, emblem
      of death, set free
from wisdom and lust’s
      infirmity?”…

—Humbert Wolfe (1885–1940), from “A Conversation,” 1932

That dreadful moment

“Growing old… that dreadful moment when we first realize that we are ourselves no longer young. It is an extraordinary moment: pain, denial, rebellion, hopelessness. It arrives in many different ways. It used to come with spectacles — but nowadays the babe wears spectacles; sometimes it creeps upon us with a little stiffening of the joints; one does not run upstairs quite as lightly as one did. It may even reveal itself in the impatience that is felt because people do not speak quite as distinctly as they should — an impatience to which the younger generation rudely refers as deafness. These are gradual intimations that we are not as young as we were.

“There are abrupt ones — especially there is the glance into the mirror some morning, after a sleepless night. Probably every woman over forty-five has known the start of astonishment and dismay that comes with that glance… The woman who has had this slight shock before breakfast glances at her looking-glass many times that day, and always with a growing comfort, for as the day passes things change; her face is more alert, her eyes brighten, her double chin is, somehow, firmer. No; it was only fatigue from a bad night; not age, oh no!”

—Margaret Deland, “The Wickedness of Growing Old,” 1905

When you were a child

When you were a child, on a summer afternoon,
Did you lie in tall grass, listening to the crickets
Foreshadowing autumn, listening to the small
Infinite sounds of earth? Did you press your cheek
And your short brown body furiously down
Into the grass, so loving the narrow roots,
So loving the hard wild flanks of hills, and summer,
That when your slight strength broke at last, you cried…
Then rising in the slow wind, cried no more
But stood and gazed with grave young eyes upon
The brief, unburdened hours lived and gone,
Yourself, the child, abandoned in the grass,
Yourself, the man, earth’s lover, who would follow
The strong years deathward, aching and possessed?

—Frances Frost, “Year of Earth,” These Acres, 1932

An Artist’s Sorrows

As the nightingale went home in the morning and hung his golden harp on the peg, he said in a bitter tone — ’Let them be sure of this, I will not sing again.’

And his wife came up to him with chirpings and hoppings to soothe him:  but nothing availed; it was clear to all that he was bitterly affronted.

Every night he went out and sang his loves to the rose; the night air throbbed and quivered to the sound.

His wife sat at home, and was contented if he was happy; moreover, she thought that, however his love raged, no harm could possibly come of it.

And now at her entreaty he told her of his sorrows, and how deeply he was wounded by what had passed.

‘I sang sweetly! I sang sweetly! the rose opened her leaves; it seemed to me that the moon rose earlier than her wont.

‘All things listened — all things near and far off listened, save only the youth and maiden who were close to me.

‘I sang sweetly! I sang sweetly! but they only turned and whispered to each other…’

—V. A. R., “An Artist’s Sorrows,” from the Kamschatskan, Poems, 1867

See me, hear me, I am fifty.

the world may see dried-up and irrelevant —
they may not even see me at all —

LOOK!  i’ve re-blossomed with beautiful new petals —
strength, focus, perspective, poetry, silver wisdom —

i am roaring out all that i have held in,
taken on, and put up with — for all my life —

i roar for myself and for all women
i roar at the top of my lungs with all my midlife rage —

LISTEN!  no longer can i do it all, nor do i want to —
i may be getting old, but also i am brand new —

Terri Guillemets