Poem-a-Day April 19: the girl inside

Mama Said …
(there’ll be days like this.)
—The Shirelles
These folks ’bout to respect me into the grave.

At eighty Mama said, (mama said)
“People think you change when you’re old
but you still got a girl inside.”
And men could see her, too
— that pink silk dress —
soothe that hotel bellboy
“Boy, I’m old enough
to be your mama.”
He coy
“well, you ain’t.”
But seventy is prime time
for me to own what “elder” brings.

I reap myself with the respect they sow.

They don’t know I got the road
wide open in me.

Hello Friends—

I must confess I strongly considered just sending you all This Llama Frolicking to DMX instead of a poem today. And then I thought perhaps I'd send you Denise Levertov's "Come into Animal Presence" and secretly hyperlink to the frolicking every time the world "llama" appears in that poem. But then I worried I'd already sent a disproportionate number of animal-related poems this April, what with all the birds and the whale and such, so: that's how we arrived back at a poem about people — specifically today: grandmothers, and the men who flirt with them. Poet Mary Moore Easter is a professor of Dance emerita who I am going to guess is enjoying her retirement to the fullest.

“Mama Said ...” appeared in the April 2013 issue of Poetry magazine and was also selected for the New York Times Poetry-News Pairings series (to complement the article “Oldest Woman in New York Celebrates Birthday No. 114.”)

Enjoy.
Ellen