Middle age is a time of transition. If we have raised a family, they are beginning to be independent. If we are going back to work, our skills may be outdated. If we have a career, we may be facing the limits of our advancement. If we are caring for our parents, it is becoming a more complicated undertaking. But we are also still young, we have the chance for a full life ahead, and we know ourselves much better than we did.
In order to plan the future, it helps to look back at the decisions we have made so far—even the bad ones. We are reminded of other times when life seemed confusing, emotions overwhelming, and the pathway forward hard to find. In this section, I have combined poems that speak to us at midlife with those that address another time of transition—growing up and becoming an adult. At both points in our lives, we are faced with a lot of uncertainty and the realization that, although we share these challenges with our friends, we must navigate them on our own. That can be both liberating and terrifying.
The choices we make during these transitions determine who we are and who we become. Poems can help us find clarity amid the confusion. They remind us that others have faced the same challenges. They celebrate the relationships that define and guide us, they can help us laugh at ourselves, and they provide wisdom and reassurance.
Each stage of life is different than we imagine it will be. Edna St. Vincent Millay captures this feeling perfectly in “Grown-up” when she is confronted with the routine of adult life, after fantasizing it to be so much more glamorous. Ellen Hagan captures the contradictory feelings of growing up fast and too fast in “Puberty—With Capital Letters,” while Parneshia Jones brings to life the conflicts between mother and daughter that repeat from generation to generation, despite our vows to be different.
In “Older, Younger, Both,” Joyce Sutphen conveys the mixed-up sensations of being young and old all at once, a feeling which is common to our teenage years and one that characterizes middle age. Other poems, like Barbara Ras’s “You Can’t Have It All” and Elizabeth Jennings’s “Old Woman,” celebrate the contentment that comes with appreciating what we have.
Each of these poets can offer guidance, provide insight, and give us strength. But in these turbulent times each of us must answer the question posed by Mary Oliver in “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”
You Begin
MARGARET ATWOOD
You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.
Grown-up
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?
Puberty—With Capital Letters
ELLEN HAGAN
There went being a kid. There went
Barbie dolls, baby dolls, kitchen sets, play-
doh, crayons, make-believe (well, maybe not
make-believe). But there went innocent, child-
like, there went one-piece bathing suits. In came
adolescence, even though I’d had my period
since I was 10. In came self-consciousness,
waiting for breasts. In came attitude, and “Why
can’t I?” “You said!” “I hate you,” under my breath.
In came diaries with hidden messages and dares
I always took. In came kissing and not kissing,
and doing it, and not doing it, and rounding bases,
and not rounding bases, and rounding bases having
nothing at all to do with baseball, and sometimes wishing
you could just play baseball instead.
In came. Rebellion. Clichés. Are you kidding? Drinking.
Do-overs. Cheer-leading Uniforms. Regret. Pure Bliss.
Uncovering. Feeling not good enough. Cockiness. Joy.
In came wild cards. Short skirts. Cocktails. 15. Funnels.
Mid-riff baring. Belly-button rings. Challenges. Being
challenging. The ultimate change. The ultimate fast-forward.
In came growing up.
Bra Shopping
Saturday afternoon, Marshall Fields, 2nd floor, women’s lingerie please.
At sixteen I am a jeans and t-shirt wearing tomboy who can think of
a few million more places to be instead of in the department store
with my mother bra shopping.
Still growing accustomed to these two new welts
lashed on to me by puberty, getting bigger by the moment,
mother looks at me and says:
While we’re here, we’ll get some new (larger) shirts for you too.
I resent her for taking me away from baseball fields,
horse play, and riding my bike.
We enter into no man’s, and I mean no man in sight land
where women fuss and shop all day for undergarments;
the lingerie department is a world of frilly lace, night gowns,
grandma panties and support everything.
Mama takes me over to a wall covered with hundreds of white bras,
some with lace and little frills or doilies like party favors,
as if undergarments are a cause for celebration.
A few have these dainty ditsy bows in the middle.
That’s a nice accent don’t you think? Mama would say. Isn’t that cute?
Like this miniature bow in the middle will take
some of the attention away from what is really going on.
When mama and I go brassiere shopping it never fails:
a short woman with an accent and glasses
attached to a chain around her neck who cares
way too much about undergarments comes up to us.
May I help you, dearies?
The bra woman assists my mother in finding the perfect bra
to as my mother put it, hold me in the proper way. No bouncing please.
Working as a team plotting to ruin my entire day
with the bra fitting marathon, they conspire up about ten bras
in each hand which equal forty. Who’s making all these bras I want to ask.
What size is she? The bra woman asks.
You want something that will support them honey, looking at me with a wink.
My mother looks straight at my chest. Oh she’s good size. She’s out of that
training bra phase. I want her to have something that will hold them up proper.
Them, them, them they say
.
Like they’re two midgets I keep strapped to my chest.
The whole time I stand there while these two women one my own kin,
discuss the maintenance and storage of my two dependents.
The worst is yet to come, the dressing room.
I hate the damn dressing room, the mirrors waiting to laugh at me,
women running in and out half-naked with things showing
that I didn’t even see on my own body.
I stand there half-naked and pissed. Mama on one side,
the bra woman on the other, I feel like a rag doll under interrogation
as they begin fixing straps, poking me, raising me up, snapping the back,
underwire digging my breasts a grave.
The bras clamp down onto me, shaping my breasts out to pristine bullets,
with no movement, no pulse, no life, just sitting fix up
like my mother wanted real proper.
I will never forgive my mother for this, I keep thinking to myself.
Looking blank face at my reflection I started thinking about how my brothers
never have to shop for undergarments, why couldn’t I have been born a boy?
I hate undergarments.
Mama looks at my face. Don’t you like any of them?
No, I say. Mama I hate this, please can we go?
Then she goes into her lecture on becoming a woman
and being responsible for woman upkeep.
After we are halfway through the inventory
mama looks at me wasting away in a sea of bras and takes pity on me.
All right, I think we have enough to last you for a while. Let’s check out.
I don’t get happy too quick ’cause I know that bra woman
still lurks about and if she senses my excitement that we are leaving
she will come with more white bras.
We make our way to the check out counter
and the bra woman rings us up.
Oh honey you picked out some beautiful bras, she says.
Just remember hand wash. How about bury, I want to ask.
She and my mother talk about how they are just right
and will do the trick for me with no bouncing at all.
The Summer Day
MARY OLIVER
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Living
DENISE LEVERTOV
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
I stepped from plank to plank
EMILY DICKINSON
I stepped from plank to plank,
A slow and cautious way;
The stars about my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch.
This gave me that precarious gait
Some call experience.
to my last period
LUCILLE CLIFTON
well girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.
now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn’t she
beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?
lumpectomy eve
LUCILLE CLIFTON
all night i dream of lips
that nursed and nursed
and the lonely nipple
lost in loss and the need
to feed that turns at last
on itself that will kill
its body for its hunger’s sake
all night i hear the whispering
the soft
love calls you to this knife
for love for love
all night it is the one breast
comforting the other
Older, Younger, Both
JOYCE SUTPHEN
I feel older, younger, both
at once. Every time I win,
I lose. Every time I count,
I forget and must begin again.
I must begin again, and again I
must begin. Every time I lose,
I win and must begin again.
Everything I plan must wait, and
having to wait has made me old, and
the older I get, the more I wait, and everything
I’m waiting for has already been planned.
I feel sadder, wiser, neither
together. Everything is almost
true, and almost true is everywhere.
I feel sadder, wiser, neither at once.
I end in beginning, in ending I find
that beginning is the first thing to do.
I stop when I start, but my heart keeps on beating,
so I must go on starting in spite of the stopping.
I must stop my stopping and start to start—
I can end at the beginning or begin at the end.
I feel older, younger, both at once.
Survivor
ROGER McGOUGH
Everyday
I think about dying.
About disease, starvation,
violence, terrorism, war,
the end of the world.
It helps
keep my mind off things.
You Can’t Have It All
BARBARA RAS
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.