Old Woman

Old Woman

She is the old woman now...

Her brown and broken teeth flash spittle

at you in her haste to convey her thoughts,

Fire in her words, tempered steel in her wisdom.

She offers you a gnarled and leather hand

that mysteriously turns to velvet

with the gentle knowing in her touch.

She watches you with eyes that are just

small twinkling specks in her face now

crinkled and creased at the corners.

But she is a visionary seeing with the light

of accumulated years.

There is tenderness in her throaty laughter;

gentleness in her tender tears.

Her mouth dons lipstick, often several shades too dark

That always seems to escape its boundary

swimming up the rivers that surround

what was once a lovely rosebud in the garden of her face.

But the words that tumble

from those old dark lips

are both ancient and forever new.

They hold her lessons and her stories in each syllable

She so eagerly bestows on youth,

from a heart that is an open book of giving

Watch as she shares her tales of living

skin hanging in loose folds,

answering to the laws of age and gravity.

See the loveliness , the beauty in this texture of time

that she wears like a holy persons robes.

Time has woven itself with threads of silver and gold

Creating this woman's wonder and her peace. The

Keepers of the cycles of the gods,

one with the moon and the tides,

This old woman shares that knowing

with the touch of her crooked fingers,

the gnarled hand dotted black and blue;

her badges and symbols of  days spent

maneuvering the confines of a narrowed world.

She no longer entertains vanity knowing

her offering of beauty is the sacred fabric of her

history and her journey,

treasures only purchased with the currency of years.

She knows....

She has happened upon the holy place;

The end and the beginning

co-existing

In a marvelous marble of timelessness.

Reviews

[Ed Hart]

it is a wonderful thing to watch a sure hand reach through the one to the timeless