Figuring Out Life While Aging
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.
Cloudy this morning,
with a hint of demolition
in the air.
This old house,
wrinkled and sagging,
still offers warmth
and bits of beauty.
A confusion of branches with still leaves bright against the firs pretending to be black: morning out the bedroom window while in my warm bed. Lost - time past and unconsciousness in the cold rising required now with eyes opened: the day with its duties and small pleasures waits.
Now that it’s winter the grass is stiff and frosted and you are not here to play summer games, how shall I laugh and stay warm? What does winter hold? Are there gifts I can accept?
My desk is covered with ‘shoulds’ and some overflow to the floor. Morning finds me regretting my weight gain in the dark. I want to avoid any stretching and I’ve used up all my ‘feels’. Now my watch is demanding I answer all my texts. The thermostat has left and the microwave has coughed. I’m out of toilet paper and the world keeps spinning on.
I shall go naked into my shroud, no robes or rings, just flesh and bones, go shrouded into the earth where flesh will leave bone, and bone will linger.
Leaves skitter across asphalt. Time expands and simultaneously shrinks. Community fades. Where can I seek refuge? In the darkness there is a light that flickers as the breeze moves the leaves. Beyond the times futures pulled me into, I stand reaching into an unimaginable prospect.
Learning Living 