Naomi Replansky (b. 1918-)
The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994, Another Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 1994.
Loss in Los Angeles
Outside, unmoving smog
How can there be a hurricane in your head?
Around you, gardens too sweetly scented.
How can you contain wilderness?
The rainy season is over.
What is that wet on your cheeks?
Age: Two Voices
1.
My brain unused,
my hands unfilled,
my words unheard
in the day's loudness.
I joke in public
and mourn in private
the slack of the skin,
the ache of the bone.
And mourn the friends
I've lost to death
and friends alive
but lost to me.
This is the way
age goes about it:
first it robs you,
then it kills.
2.
What blasphemy
to rail at age
when only luck
got you this far!
Sickness, raiding
the streets of childhood,
seized your brother
but let you pass.
By luck, by luck,
by the width of an ocean,
you were not gassed
in the screaming chamber.
Not gouged by famine,
not scarred by war,
your body still
plays out its beat.
3.
My body still
plays out its beat
and praises age,
this patient friend,
and fights with age,
this robber who
ransacks my house
before it kills.