I was delighted to have 2 poems published in this book “Wild Crone
Wisdom," but the cover drawing disappointed me. As a lifelong, gender non-conforming dyke, I would have like to have seen greater representation of different types of crones: crones of color, crones of differing abilities and, of course, crones who wouldn't be caught dead wearing floor length formal red gowns. There could have been a group of crones or even distant silhouettes of women, a landscape, flowers or simply a beautiful design.
Invisibility is a particularly insidious form of discrimination. Yes, I know this new press needs to sell books, but at whose expense? At least she's not wearing high-heeled shoes! Part of being a crone involves dealing with loss, and yes, preparing to relinquish our lives and coming to terms with our mortality is the ultimate loss. True wild crone wisdom involves the acceptance of impermanence. So take it from this crone who is a proud gender outlaw. The crones I seek to learn from are quite a bit wilder than the one pictured here.
I tap through this cyberworld,
where trails of keystrokes represent immortality.
This is who I am, who I have been:
much older now and writing
my obituary online.
I have no family left.
Parents long dead, one childless,
aging lesbian warrior;
pressing down cyber-grass
much like moving
through fields of tradition,
I leave indentations
like crop circles
marking distance traveled.
I cruise the information highway
looking for my legacy.
This road of imagination
where dreams are memorialized
alongside offhand comments,
spoken simply as soundbites,
throwaway lines.
Posts note only minutes spent,
ideas considered; vistas seen.
Links connect me to a human network,
a community displaying
accomplishment and artifice side by side;
brutal honesty woven with lies
and infused with great mystery.
Digital footprints declare
although I moved through this world unnoticed,
for just one brief click of time,
I passed this way.
I was here.
Musical Memory--Joan Annsfire
Music transports me.
to that peak of memory just above necessity,
ushering me back to a time
when family was a given
and all questions were new.
Childhood, for me, was not
a gentle place of care
but a steep wall I learned to scale
with expert precision.
My mother, self-taught on piano,
would play chords of show tunes
as my sister, father and I sang along,
If notes were fudged or missed altogether,
we just sang louder.
Her notes provided a crescendo of power and magic,
spilling out beyond sorrow,
a long-guarded promise;
a dance moving me to the far edge
of possibility.
With this soundtrack
My life felt more like a movie.
A fierce cacophony of splendor,
destined for a cataclysmic ending.
Those were days of
precarious hope and artful balance.
My struggle, a mountain I would attempt to summit,
while avoiding fissures of malformed parenting
threatening each step.
Music transports me.
Especially when I’m most in the grip
of this merciless, difficult world.
Harmonious sound reverberates deeply
through the vortex of time.
For one moment, it evokes the past
then trades it for a song.
