Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts:Poems On Aging
Our Aching Bones, Our Broken Hearts: Poems on Aging
by Joel Savishinsky, The Poetry Box,
Ageing in the modern world is a conundrum. Armed with self-delusion and money, we spend precious resources fighting the inevitable. We will get older. No matter how many supplements, how much exercise, barrels of “super foods,” insurance, meditation, hair dye, or surgery, our bodies will age. Until they don’t.
Unlike in some ancient cultures, the aged are not honored today. They are disguised as middle-aged until they can be safely stowed away and filed according to physical and mental characteristics. Outside urban areas, the most common new buildings are not schools or affordable housing, but “assisted living” and “memory care” units, euphemisms for the incredibly pricy storage of old people. The luckiest will accept their confinement, mobility scooters, and infantile entertainment with relief. The rest of us will rage, rage, against the dying of the light, or maybe just the lack of a private trip to the toilet.
Joel Savishinsky, an anthropologist and gerontologist, has compiled a slender book of observations, ostensibly about aging, but really, about the human condition. His observations spring from the aged themselves, their families, careers, and, in a particularly poignant piece, someone who sums up his life in a few airless lines:
Lying in bed reading
I heard the planes grinding
the night up into
a dark grain. I knew
in a new way that
my sons, with children
of their own, would now
never cease to worry
and so had made
me old, a profession
I might be better at
than parenting or
fail at anew in
another way. I hoped
they would forgive me
Savishinsky switches his characters deftly. His aged voices have not given up, but they recognize their situation. Their family members aren’t dismissive or hateful or anxious to inherit the elders’ wealth. They want to do the right thing, but they are tired, confused, and clinging to the vague hope that it will all, somehow be better, one way or another.
His placement of the poems is equally deft. The tale of his father’s “second coronary” – set in a hospital not much changed in present day – immediately precedes the poem about his own hospital stay. The poet attempts, it seems, to put himself in both the patient’s and the son’s places, drawing the emotional threads of each closer. The son had dreaded the vision of his father so frail, so close to death, to the point of fainting. As the patient himself, he wonders if his own children will understand his life and inevitable death the way he had not in his own youth.
Yet Savishinsky is not without a wry humor about the whole business of being human. Musing on a spring day as he walks among the flowering trees, he struggles to find poetry therein, as have the greatest (and other) poets of every age..
With a playful shrug, he offers instead:
There are days I wish they would just stop and
simply let me walk. My full mind, unfortunately,
is poorly furnished for the work of mindfulness.
But I admit I am a very bad Buddhist, so I will stop
here and spare us both that business about the lotus.
The poet comments on the COVID-19 pandemic, lest we delude ourselves in forgetting how close to death we all were – our own or others’. He folds it into the context of the larger inevitability: we will all die. Some of us will get old before that happens.
As a retired nurse, now a stocker in a supermarket observes: we are all stamped with a sell-by date. We just don’t know what it is.
Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts is not a grim work, nor is it particularly mournful. It celebrates living in a hopeful vein. Instead of focusing on the loss that old age imposes, it seeks the vitality that every breath can bring, without resorting to sticky platitudes. A worthy compendium in every respect.
D Ferrara
Writer, editor and collaborator D Ferrara’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals. She is the editor of American Writers Review, and a co-editor and contributor to “Jewels of San Fedele,” an anthology. Her script, Arvin Lindemeyer Takes Canarsie won Outstanding Screenplay in the Oil Valley Film Festival. Her play, Favor, won NJ ACT’s Outstanding Production of an Original Play.