It Beats the Alternative: Poems on Growing Older

I was less conscious of my age and the aging process when I was younger. Now when I stand up I may utter a little "oof", and my ankles make a lot of crackling sounds. (Pro tip: Stand up from your sofa or chair without using your arms to push yourself up. You'll be using, and thus helping to maintain, more of your body's strength. Same goes for getting up from the toilet, for that matter.)

My parents lived into their 90s. One of my grandfathers lived to be 95; my grandmothers lived into their 80s. I feel as if I come from a long-lived line and I've had better nutrition and health care than any of them, so it's not that I'm peering into the grave. But I find that some poems resonate for me now that I imagine I wouldn't have found as relevant at 30 or 40. Some poetry can't be written until you've arrived at that place—maybe all of it! 

Most of these are specific to aging as a woman. US society, with its worship of the taut, the slender, the unattainable, begins to ignore older women unless they're famous enough to rate the cover of AARP's magazine. While freedom from the male gaze brings its own kind of relief, ageism, sexism, ableism, and all the other -isms can make for a foul brew. When someone tries to pour that into my cup, I decline. I am just as much me, myself and I at every age that lies ahead as I was in the years behind me. I have become who I am walking a path I'm still on. 

For the most part these poems celebrate, rather than mourn, the passing of the years. I'm sharing a few lines from each to invite you to explore them in full.

"At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor" 
Sandra Cisneros

Not old.
Correction, aged.
Passé? I am but vintage.

"A Face, A Cup" 
Molly Peacock

A break-up,
a mix-up, a wild mistake: these show in a face
like the hairline cracks in an ancient cup.

"At the Moment"
Joyce Sutphen

I thought about the way we’d aged,

how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew
dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.

"Days I Delighted in Everything"
Hilda Raz

because surely there was a passage of life where I thought
“These days I delight in everything,” right there in the
present, because they almost all feel like that now,
memory having markered only the outline while evaporating
the inner anxieties of earlier times.

"Senior Discount"
Ali Liebegott

I want to grow old with you.
Old, old.

So old we pad through the supermarket
using the shopping cart as a cane that steadies us.

"Here"
Grace Paley

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

"Doing Water Aerobics in the Senior Living Community with Janie Bird"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

frisky as ducklings, tender as saplings
inside old trunks, joyful
as old women who remember
how good it feels to be buoyant
as geese, resilient as ourselves.

"Hear the Water's Music"
Tere Sievers

There is only one way, aging beauties,
to go down this river,
to hear the water's music over the rocks,

"Midlife"
Julie Cadwallader-Staub

to see
a bend in the river up ahead
and still
say
yes.

"Turning 70"
David Allan Evans

...with my eyes
fiercely wide open, each day seconding Prospero’s
“be cheerful, sir,” and Lao Tzu’s tree bending
in the wind, 

"Starfish"
Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee.

"We Are a River"
William Martin, based on Lao Tzu

Don't accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.

"Still Learning"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

It doesn’t occur to me
to tell her about what will happen.
I flit by as she stays on the wall.
She’ll learn soon enough.