Until Sweet Forty

 

In the quiet dawn, my bones remember

the weight of years, each a fading ember.

At forty-two, though the teeth were fewer,

the tongue had aged, sharper, truer.

Once a poor child in borrowed grace,

now wisdom shadows my changing face.

Time’s drums thundered through my veins,

naming scars, rehearsing pains.

They called it madness, love misread,

a passing storm inside my head.

Some said, even broken, she must be bound-

a chain disguised as safety found.

To friends, I smiled, a practiced art;

to lovers, a shard lodged in the heart.

Promises thin and fragile as glass

shattered, mended, as moments passed.

Children laughed, cruel and kind,

seeing youth replayed in an aging mind.

The mirror offered a borrowed frame-

grey hair, sharp bones, love unnamed.

With no one left to answer back,

I struck the world with poems intact.

When debts grew loud, trains crossed my skull;

when freed, I ran through alleys, full.

Night stroked my silence without a word;

my father and I listened, unheard.

Among strange faces, a gentle why

became a wind that kept me alive.

In crowded halls, when sight fell short,

friends dissolved without report.

Each year counted itself in pain-

heart and stomach, stone and strain.

I wrestled medicine, learned its rules,

the body’s stubborn, secret schools.

Love survives by measured space,

a distant hold, a hidden grace.

The child in me still stamps her feet;

the lover claims love’s final seat.

The wife returns, again, again,

with first-night hunger, seasoned skin.

Age wages war-hair greys, bones bare,

teeth fall, flesh thins, breath learns prayer.

I fight, I train, I shine, I fall,

answering time’s unending call.

Until then, with each breath I give,

I keep my life poem alive-to live.