“Free verse emotional poem about getting older”

Time does not warn me; it slides  
under doors, slips through cracks in childhood’s photographs.  
Some mornings, I wake surprised  
that my hand, stretched toward the window’s uncertain daylight,  
wears a map of rivers I never sailed.  
The old scars are verses—some I earned, some I stumbled into  
like a blind wanderer walking dusk roads.  
Sometimes laughter comes more quietly,  
like an echo in a wider room,  
but I still invite it in,  
offering the chair by the kitchen window  
where the light pools, thick and golden,  
onto the page of book I forget I’m holding.  

I lose things more—  
names like marbles rolled under the heavy old couch,  
that old certainty that summer would last.  
Still: there is sweetness in the dailiness of tea  
resting expectantly against my palm—  
the warmth, the rising steam,  
like love,  
simply given.  

I speak with my children, and the world reverses—  
I remember pressing their soft heads  
against my shoulder,  
the impossible scent of newness.  
Now they sketch galaxies for me  
on notepaper and skin,  
unfazed by all my questions.  

And I—  
I remember morning glories,  
how they unwind and fling blue trumpets to the sun,  
even when the night’s been cold.  
So I let myself be tender with my younger selves:  
the one who ran,  
the one who wept,  
the one who stood,  
spine a little straighter,  
watching clouds drift toward something  
like acceptance.  

Let this be enough:  
the home built from memory,  
the horizon bending gently as I go,  
each day a page of soft and imperfect lines,  
the story unfinished,  
richer in the telling,  
older in the becoming.

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