As soon as I posted my first collection of poems about getting older I found more and started a second list. That's life, isn't it? Just when you think you're finished with something it comes around again, kind of like birthdays.
There's accepting, and there's embracing. Most of these poems embrace the aging process and what we attain as we become elders, sages, crones. Others keep alive the hope of new love, new adventures.
"Aging"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I, too, am changing
in these long days.
I, too, am converting what I’ve known
into what I will be.
I, too, am becoming something
I almost don’t recognize—
heady with transformation,
"Credo"
Victoria Miller
I want to be recycled endlessly, and flower again
and yet again unexpectedly, bloom into
a surprising color for an old woman, ripe
with wrinkled youth and vigorous beauty,
with twinkling eyes in deep sockets,
making them wonder
just how I do it.
"By the Numbers"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Let me grow old
on belly laughs.
Let me know my true age
in kisses. And though
it is a finite number,
let me lose count.
"I Confess"
Alison Luterman
I stalked her
in the grocery store: her crown
of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,
her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,
"I ["No, no, there is no going back"]"
Wendell Berry
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
"Counting Backwards"
Linda Pastan
There are places
where at 60 they start
counting backwards;
in Japan
they start again
from one.
"Still Singing"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
There comes a day when a woman knows
she’s more Mother Superior than Maria—
"There Is an Old Woman Inside Me"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I love the old woman inside me,
gnarled as the branches of an old peach tree.
She is no stranger to how the world changes.
Every day I practice to be more like her,
"Counting Backwards"
Linda Pastan
How did I get so old,
I wonder,
contemplating
my 67th birthday.
Dyslexia smiles:
I’m 76 in fact.
A quotation from poet Tomas Tranströmer to wrap up this collection:
"We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is me. The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones."
