Poems

Poem by Marge Piercy (Piercy, 2006)

I met a woman who wasn’t there

The CIA should hire as spies only women over fifty, because we are the truly invisible.

We pass through checkpoints as if through spider webs with only a slime of derision.

Watch television, go to the movies (if you can afford the ticket prices; maybe not since older women are the unimportant poor) and you see only children, young females.

Older men thrive, with escorts half their age, but older women must die off en masse.

In middle age even with Botox, liposuction, face lifts, tummy tucks, whatever mad torture to the poor hardworking flesh surgeons can devise, we begin to vanish.

Walk through a lobby, a crowded airport: men, children will run into you in the obvious opinion you cannot possibly exist.

We are inaudible too.

We speak and people turn away.

Although we know more, our opinions are dust on the wind. Nobody collects or records them.

We are the age’s lepers.

They would like us penned out of sight in colonies of hunger.

You have let yourself go.

You have not refused the years politely, firmly like an anorexic at a dinner party.

A sitcom joke, jealous witch, bag, you are in-tangible, for who trained on media will stroke your soft quivering belly, your tingling breasts.

Survivor, crone, wise woman history’s warnings are etched on your bones.

Like Cassandra you have witnessed wars and famines and you foresee that wind of ash blowing in, but to your prophecies only your cats will listen.

Poetry recommendations from Nicky Riding

THE UNINVITED GUEST

by

MARIE MULVEY-ROBERTS

I notice you most in the dark
No manners, barging in
Like opening the door of an oven
Though always tropically radiant.
Now you can save on fuel bills
You told me with a smirk.
But I found you to be
A most impolite bedfellow.

I didn’t invite this intruder
Smasher of rhythms
Jolter of sleep
You kept your distance until now,
Keeping company with old women
Who gradually got younger,
Until they reached my age.

Your presence registers an absence
The pause in the meno
And, one day, you too will be gone
To plague someone else
And open that oven door
To a new beginning.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/menopause/short/

https://www.poetrysoup.com/poems/menopause

Writing Menopause: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry and Creative Nonfiction