Dear baby me:
You were wrinkled
You had no hair
Couldn't walk
Couldn’t formulate a thought
Cried a lot
Couldn't see too clear
Couldn’t distinguish what I hear
Can’t figure out how
I am so much like that now
It happened too fast
Why didn't my youth last
Seemed in an instant
I was no longer an infant
I knew nothing of life
But sure now it’s with strife
I remember way back when
I can’t remember now and then
It’s just not really fair
Being old with flair
No one forgot the baby you see
I hope no one forgets the now me

See
by Michael R. Burch

See how her hair has thinned: it doesn’t seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there, then burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are—that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows, elegant and rare.
For life remains undimmed in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book’s.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.

Keywords/Tags: Elderly, woman, grandmother, thin, thinning, hair, airy, emu, moult, soft, plumage, wrinkles, laugh lines, frail, gaunt, bones, winter, grave, eyes, courage, laughter, family, gathered, bedside, kisses, hugs, goodbyes, farewells, life, death, photo album, pictures, photos, photographs

Published by The Eclectic Muse, Love Me Knots (an anthology of the top 100 contemporary love poems), Nutty Stories (South Africa), Black Medina, The New Formalist, Better Than Starbucks, Potcake Chapbooks, Strange Roads, Sonnetto Poesia, Litera (UK), Poems About, Poetry Life & Times, MahMag (in a Farsi translation by Dr. Mahnaz Badihian), Somewhere Along The Beaten Path (Anthology), Freshet, Life & Legends, Famous Poets & Poems, Short Quotes & Poems (listed in the top 10 short poems) and Victorian Violet Press. “See” won 3rd place in the 2003 Writer’s Digest Rhyming Poetry contest, out of over 18,000 overall entries, and was published in Writer’s Digest’s The Year’s Best Writing.

Eloquence has an heir
embrace winter
she has a Sterling
head of hair.

Yes, I'm 65, now elderly,
That's the term, officially,
One day, shopped locally,
Bought a lotto, luckily?
Someone wins tonight, says she,
Dear God, why can't it be me?
Yes, yes, this lotto is lucky,
Wait for the draw, breathlessly,
Anticipate now I am elderly,
Old folk can be winners too, says she,
This is going to be my lucky night,
If I win, I can sort the bill for the light,
Getting old is not for hissy fits,
Come on, lotto, let's have a bit!

Skinny, papery, wrinkled, and pale
Running a rosary through her fingers
The air shimmers, balmy ocean waves that never cease
From the shaded marble step, I ask:
“Why do you suffer rituals out in the scorching sun?”
“My child, that’s how it’s always been done.”

She has taken Times test
And stood till she was 80
The skin is thin on those old bones now
She shivers
And for the first time feels
old and frail

Old-man at the grocery
transfers his bags from motor-cart
to push-buggy. I stop to ask
if he might like some help.

‘No,’ he says, and in his age
I see defiance,
refusal to give up
what little control
he still maintains.

'I’m good,’ he affirms
before he directs his fragility
out into the dark parking lot–
out into the cold.

Way out,

further than one would walk
where there are no sidewalks
and the side of the road is dust and thorns and small tiny melons of no consequence and occasional vultures become more-often-than-not vultures

where there is nothing but walnut groves and train tracks,

three of us found a place to cut loose

and be the punks we hoped to be.

Way out,
we found a few patches of weeds,
abandoned farm equipment,
decayed everything,
a toppled barn,
and a dry canal,

so we brought spray paint,
****** beer,
and threw rocks at passing trains.

We built bonfires and howled
no one cared.

Until an old man in a wrinkled hat  
pulled his truck in to the tall grass
and watched us.

We hid our cigarettes as if he cared.

I walked over to check
but before I could give some poor excuse for our behavior,
he said,
“I was born here.”

Here?
This place was nothing. It was way out.
Old silos, maybe.
No houses.
No town.
No place to be born.
Just a place for kids like us to scrawl graffiti on pallets and rusted forgotten truck trailers.

“Used to be a town,” he said.
“Your standing in the post office.”
At my feet a cement slab crumbled into the white dust.

It is here that I wish this poem was about a tender moment
where an old man taught a young man about some hidden past.
Or that this poem reminded us about the secrets hidden all around us, if we just look.

It could be about a regained wonder for our elders or about memory or a certain flower that he pointed out which blooms in the ghost towns of our nostalgias and how that flowers Latin name means something that becomes a grand metaphor for rebirth...

But it’s not and he drove off without another word.

We picked up our spray paint and threw beer bottles against the canal bank, shattering them in a place no one would notice
except that old man,  
who would see my vulgarity
and poor attempt at protest haphazardly sprayed
over the last place he can remember seeing his mother, by the backdoor,
that autumn evening he left and took that job in Sacramento.

If we're together
When we're older,
If one's not left for another,
If one's not dead,
Or out of sorts
Or imprisoned on an institutional bed;
Let me tell what lies ahead.

We'll go to sleep wearing socks,
And rise by our internal clocks;
While on walks we'll hold hands,
And listen while the other talks.
We'll sit content by the St. Clair River
In Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter.

We'll have our tea and buttered toast,
On weekends enjoy your Sunday Roast.
Around the table our children sit,
With grandkids we're blessed to be with.
Then, in the evening, when all are gone,
And we're in our home of homes,
I'll confess my love again;
You're all I've wanted all along.