Ninety Years Young
I am classified
senior.
Here there are no elder statesmen,
only the rich become elders.
The poor become merely old.
Fodder for special housing.
On occasions they remark
my attendance.
Once I was part of the GNP,
now I am congratulated
for surviving.
They ask my age impudently
as they ask a child.
We are both referred to
in the third person
as if we were not in the room
which soon I won’t be.
They nod as if my years
tell them something,
but they are mute.
For I have forgotten much
that I should have held close
and recreated a past
that never existed.
Were I not so impatient
with their conclusions
we might talk.
But I am,
and we don’t.
~ Melodie Corrigall
Melodie Corrigall has been published in West Coast Contemporary Poets, Woman to Woman, Room of One’s Own, Canadian Short Fiction, Imagining, Horizon Magazine and The Dalhousie Review.
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