Tuesday poem #645 : Diana Manole : Aging in Place

 

 

This morning, the sciatica gets the best of me
but I don’t give up! I hop on one leg
getting ready to leave. No matter how much I rush,
I miss the school bus
and arrive after the bell rings.
There are empty desks only in the first grade—
horizontal, vertical, diagonal lines, all tremble
on my worksheets. The teacher worries about
my hand/eye coordination. I tell her I have
cataracts, but she doesn’t believe.
“This an old age’s disease and you’re just a little
girl. Perhaps you need glasses.”
She may be right: I see myself in her pupils
squinting at her—
a little girl, chestnut-hair tied back into pigtails
with red-yellow-blue silky bows,
a zit about to burst on my forehead.
Only the sharp pain in my leg doesn’t fit
the picture. 

*

I’m too old to cross the street on red. I stand
at the lights, waiting. A wedding party passes by.
They stop in the middle of the road for pictures.
All the cars go around them, headlights flashing and
honking in the rhythm of the Wedding March.
“How considerate!” I think.
The bride throws me her bouquet—
apple tree branches in bloom.
I catch it, suddenly snowed down in petals. The groom
starts waving at me.
“What does he want?” I wonder.
Aargh! No, I can’t join them though I’d like to be
in the pictures. No matter how long I wait,
the lights don’t turn green.

 

 

 

 

Bucharest-born Diana Manole immigrated in 2000 and now identifies as a proudly hyphenated Romanian-Canadian award-winning writer, literary translator, theatre artist, and scholar. She holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and a Master of Journalism from Carleton University. For almost twenty years, she has been teaching at Ontario universities, courses in Theatre and Performance, Canadian, English, and Anglophone literatures and Creative Writing.

Her poetry was published in English and/or in translation in literary magazines in 14 countries, including Canada, UK, US, France, Spain, Italy, China, and Romania. Diana was awarded the 2020 Very Small Verse prize of the League of Canadian Poets and Honorable Mention in the 2023 Lush Triumphant Poetry of “subterrain” magazine, Canada. The English-Romanian dual-language “Praying to a Landed-Immigrant God (Grey Borders Books, 2023) is her seventh collection of poems. Her poetry is inspired by her everyday life as an immigrant woman and by her determination to fight against discrimination of any kind. Since 2013, Diana has been dreaming and writing poetry in English. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan