Learning to Play at Eighty
Learning to Play at Eighty
As a young child I drew,
painted, modeled clay
hunted for fossils, swung
on vines—
ran free in acres, woods
Then bore a son: malformed
heart, stroke, hospitals, blood
Calls too close to count
I couldn’t find my skin
Bullied, shunned in school
and out
Days clutched by fear,
grief, a mother’s feral fury
How could they?
Now old, and my son fifty-one
time at last, inclination
to play
office become studio
table strewn with paints
a mother's feral fury - oh yes!
Hooray for painting! And what a succinct, poignant history relayed in this poem. The reader shares the narrator's sorrow and fury, too... and relief, at last, as the title so well says, "learning to play." And at eighty! Bravo, you!