When Should We Senior Women Not?
By Ann Grogan
after former First Lady Michelle Obama at a Kamala Harris for President rally at Kalamazoo, MI on October 27, 2024
“You look amazing” Michelle Obama said
to a lady sitting front and center.
When should we senior women not look good?
What is amazing about a woman age one hundred?
Inherent in what Obama said, a sense of injustice:
should this lady a zombie be
of skeleton bones and bloody rags of dragging skin?
Should she limp along, cane in hand at a rally
of ghoulish gals who sally forth
through ragged fields of grass to protest?
Should men be locked and loaded
one man/one gun against the hoards of
vixen vermin descending for our Final Supper?
Should I preserve my leftovers in Tupper Wear?
Plait draggle-strands of hair—what’s left of it,
and with bloody handprints on the railing of the stairs,
drag myself to bed? Should one care how words are used,
like “she’s still pretty” or “she still has sex”—
as if I should be dead at eighty?
Should we do what they expect?
Should I give up lipstick, lie down midst daisies
in the field, beyond my expiration date?
Retire at 50 or perhaps next year before
my life runs out, to be no more?
Who set the age (against which I rage)
for giving up? Who held that clue,
or as a piano teacher said, at 80 I should be
proud to be playing as well as you do.
How terribly should I play at “my age”?
What’s surprising if love and skill break through
at my stage, not ready for my final rest—
and by some miracle, I play my best?
Ann Grogan is a joyful octogenarian, retired lawyer, and emerging poet who lives in San Francisco, CA. Her writing promotes the unequivocal permission to pursue one’s passions at any age. Her poems have appeared in Querencia, Ameythst Review, Shot Glass Journal, Little Old Lady, The Prairie Review, Dissent Voice, New Verse News, Oddball Journal, Vistas & Byways, and the University of Vermont’s Continuing Education Newsletter. She’s the author of two volumes of poetry, Poetic Musings on Pianos, Music & Life. Her music and poetry website is rhapsodydmb.com.
Photo credit: Photoscarce via a Creative Commons license.
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