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This year, Florida State Poets Association (FSPA) held its annual fall convention at Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales, FL on October 25-27. The following poem was announced as a winner in the FSPA 2025 Contests. In Category #1: Free Verse, it earned the 1st Place Award, $100.00 and publication in Cadence anthology.
An Aged World Speaks
-Mary Rogers-Grantham, Poet and Professor
I have been old for a very long time.
I see tears that are tired, tears that are angry,
and tears that just don't know what to do.
And so, I cry too. I take nothing for granted
even when wisdom seems as scattered as dust
particles I cannot see. I am torn and the separation
of my fabric has jagged wounds of global infections.
I bury my face in my hands.
I feel effects of raw fear and blatant worry,
the addictive robbers of abundant living
tracking centuries from ago. I still ask what,
but only hear the sounds of loud and
the silence of secrets chasing each other.
I am reminded that aging pauses to die
and grief sounds like was.
I hear translation in the metamorphosis of violence
as it takes shape in the context of the next thing.
I engage my memory and it forgets its original form.
Hunger growls on earth and roams continents
scavenging hope and dreaming answers.
I reject the power dynamic while quietly digesting
literal ways and figurative ways to lace survival.
I taste the crumbs of blues as they grunt
and grumble in profiles of consciousness,
sweaty voices painting tired into lyrical
language in shattered pieces and shadowed
phrases about the haunted house where
happy once lived, now then, erasure is
the occupant squatter bucking trend of was.
I smell daily leftovers with my hungry spirit,
inhale every gaze that never changes, only
fade into voices on hold like a choir enduring
the wait time for its first-time ever singing.
I reprimand judgment and abbreviate anxiety.
I am torn and the separation of my fabric
ļ»æhas jagged wounds of global infections.
I have been old for a very long time.
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