Figuring Out Life While Aging
2015 & still today!
I have a horror
hangover:
a surfeit of tv news dribbles
repeating
the images and words -
addictive
and numbing.
To look away, to change the channel,
I switch to a story of plotted
murder, where the killer
is named and blamed
and hunted and destroyed -
and it’s over!
When I can’t resist tv news glancing again,
the crowds are still
raging in the streets.
I almost wake as I lumber
lurching on sleep-stiff ankles
and return to my night-warmed bed.
In the east, out the window,
I watch the pine boughs shift
and sway and still and shift.
Resting on the next street’s roofs
a pale gold light bleeds upward
behind the narrowing pine,
at the window’s top,
the sky’s grey-white
hints at blue.
Snow -
enough to cover, not to shovel -
squeaks
under my feet.
Bitter cold
burns my cheeks.
Walking alone
is painful.
I raise my face
to the sun.
This terrible comfort
of missing you
woos, wounds
and pushes me,
painfully,
into a new time,
a new way of being.
Excavating our accumulated
structures, sorting
and letting go of what
is not mine is
surgery without sedation:
scars and healing.
On the day I wake,
still on my side but
stretching into
the centre of our bed,
I notice I no longer
listen
for kitchen sounds
or the key
opening the door.
Knowing I am attuned
to being alone
is the loss
that feels like a betrayal -
as though I have accepted
your absence.
Golden from the top of the pine
and later lighting the curving branch,
showing the dull green
of all the wet overcast days.
New Moon sickle
above the hydro wire
and sunlit bare branches,
waving in the wind.
Change comes.
A poem I wrote in mid 2022
I don’t know how to live
without the carapace
Of coupledom.
Flayed, raw now,
every drop of anger or disdain
burns;
every discovery of smooth deception
rams
into my gut.
I want a leather dress
that reaches my work boots
and a masked helmet
with psychic glasses
while I grow
thick scarred skin,
armour while I learn
how to walk alone.
I remember Christmas like
unevenly matched pearls
strung on carols and secular music
you hear only two weeks a year,
while dreaming
of a White Christmas, and a Silent Night
in frantic malls.
The tree, skipped this year,
some red berry branches and
the inherited Nativity set out,
a few remaining paper cards,
unheard phone calls replaced
by Facebook, texts and emails.
The multiple demands for donations
filling up inboxes.
The mass-made stockings with glitter names
mostly empty now. Gift cards for
those with unknown wishes,
And chocolate,
and chocolate, and
wine.
Turkey and cranberries, shortbread.
And family traditions and stories,
some joyful and some
hard to swallow - the absences and angers,
the reluctant visits,
the empty dining room chairs.
Church choirs carolling.
and Christmas albums on YouTube,
and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”
and a Christmas-themed movie.
With eggnog.
And warm hugs before an early night.
Bare black branches twist against
the leached-grey sky. My eyes,
pulled to the leaping, racing squirrels,
see only movement, blinded, in the moment, to
the shape of the trees
and the message of the sky.
I think I know, as my eyes follow
what moves,
but my feeling-branches spread,
reaching out their complex paths
resting within
the Holy Whole.
A re-post of a poem I wrote a few years ago.
Midwinter is a time of darkness, a time when the light lessens and disappears, a time when we mix hope and fear. The worldly powers shape much, but not every detail, of our lives. We can, as this Christian story suggests, as Mary might have experienced it, face our lives with faith, with belief that out of our struggles, meaning will emerge.
This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” – Matthew 2:15
It was a dark time –
Mary had wanted to be glad
Joseph had chosen her
but that strange dream …
and old Elizabeth, swollen with child,
calling her blessed, saying a
Child was growing in her
too, yet she’d never…
except in that strange dream;
and she had swollen
and Joseph,
angry and sad and puzzled,
had planned to hide
her disgrace, but he dreamed
too,
and married her but slept
apart
and would not look at her.
It was a dark time.
It was a dark time –
the rulers had decided
to count them all where
their ancestors had lived
so Joseph and Mary must walk
for days, weeks, and her so
large and tired, and both so
puzzled and hopeful and fearful.
Could the Holy One really have chosen
them?
Still they must walk,
as the rulers
demanded, in the cold,
in the darkening time, they must
walk into Bethlehem, this ancient
town, filled with others obeying
the rulers who wanted to count them and did not care
about walking, or a room for a
young woman with her time
pressing on her,
with the Holy One’s Gift demanding
His time on earth,
and no room for this family
It was a dark time.
There was light at His birth –
light in Mary’s eyes and
light in Joseph’s smile and
light flowing out, pulsing out
around the wondrous Child
light that brought the amazed
shepherds,
and star light that
brought the Wise Ones from
afar to worship
Him
and light that the eyes in
the dark could see, whispering to
a man with too much power
that he was nothing
beside such Light,
and the Holy One sent another
dream to guard the Light, to
hide it in a foreign land
and Mary and Joseph fled
into Egypt, carrying the Light
away from the darkness of
Herod’s massacre of babies.
It was a dark time.
It was a dark time –
waiting in a foreign land,
watching Him grow, and learning
patience and trust, waiting
for a new dream, yearning for
home
and then
out of the dark time,
the dream came.
Learning Living 