In Praise of Old Women

by Marya Fiamengo

Yes, Tadeusz Rozewicz, I too

prefer old women.

they bend over graves

with flowers,

they wash the limbs of the dead,

they count the beads of their rosaries,

they commit no murders,

they give advice

or tell fortunes,

they endure.

In Poland, in Russia,

in Asia, in the Balkans,

I see them shawled, kerchiefed,

bent-backed, work-wrinkled.

But Tadeusz,

have you been to America?

Where we have no old women.

No Stara Babas,

no haggard Madonnas.

Everyone, Tadeusz, is young in America.

Especially the women

with coifed blue hair

which gleams like the steel

of jets in the daytime sky.

Smooth-skinned at sixty,

second debuts at fifty

renascent

they never grow old in America.

And we have in America

literate, sexually liberated women

who wouldn’t touch a corpse

who confuse lechery with love,

not out of viciousness

but boringly

out of confusion, neurosis, identity crises.

Tadeusz,
I go to the cemetery with my mother

one of us stoically old,

the other aging.

and I tell, Tadeusz,

I will grow old in America.

I will have no second debut

I will raise my son on old battles,

Kossovo, Neretva, Thermopylae,

Stalingrad and Britain

and I will wrinkle adamantly in America.

I will put salt in the soup
and I will offer bread and wine

to my friends

and I will stubbornly praise old women

until their thin taut skins

glow like Ikons ascending on escalators

like Buddhas descending in subways,

and I will liberate all women

to be old in America

because the highest manifestation of

Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom)

is old and a woman.

picture - Peasant Woman with Child, Russian, 1912
Kazimir Malevich