28/02/2024
❤️
VALENTINE TO A
MID LIFE WOMAN
Mid-life woman
you are not
invisible to me,
I seem to see
beneath your face
all the women
you have ever been.
Mid-life woman
I have grown
with you
secretly,
in another parallel,
breathing with you
as you breathed,
seeing with you
as you see,
lining my face
with an earned care
as you lined yours,
waiting for you,
as it seems
you waited for me.
I see your
inner complexion
breathing beneath
your outward gaze,
I see all your lives
and all your loves,
it must be for you
that I wanted to become
more generous,
a better man
than I could be
when young,
let me join all your
present giving
and all your receiving.
Through you I learn
the full imagination
of every previous affection.
Mid-life woman
you are not
invisible to me,
in you
I see a young girl,
lifting her face
to the sky,
I see the
young woman
in haloed light,
full and strong,
standing before
the altar of time,
waiting for her life.
I see the mother
in you,
in your past
or if not
in this life,
in some yet
to be understood
future,
I see you
adoring and
I see you adored,
and now,
when I call your name
I want to see
day by day,
the woman
you will become
with me.
Mid-life woman
come to me now,
I see you more clearly
than all
the airbrushed
girls of the world.
I became a warrior
only to earn
your present
mature affection,
I bare my scars to you,
my eyes are lined
to smile with you
and I come to you
uncultivated
and unshaven
walking rough
and wild through rain
and wind and I pace
the mountain
all night
in my happy,
magnificence
at finding you.
Mid-life woman,
In the dark of the night
I take you in my arms
and in that embracing
invisibility feel all of your
inner lives made touchable
and visible again.
Mid-life woman
I have earned
my ability to adore you.
Mid-life woman
you are not invisible to me.
Come to me now
and let me kiss passionately
all the beautiful women
who have
ever lived in you.
My promise
is to you now
and all their future lives.
…
MID LIFE WOMAN
from
'THE SEA IN YOU' :
Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love’
https://www.amazon.com/Sea-You-Twenty-Requited-Unrequited/dp/1932887385/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1447615029&sr=1-1&keywords=david+whyte+the+sea+in+you
…
One of the singular mercies of growing slightly older might be that, with only a little maturity of vision we begin to find older faces, in men or women, if they have kept the light in their eyes, even more attractive than their younger versions. Though a friend of mine declares it could be because our eyesight is beginning to fade, I rather see it as the ability to see through one face, all the faces they have ever been, and in this poem, in one woman, all the women they have ever been. Part of the hard, endless path of maturing, is the need to learn to see in ourselves and in each other that we are everything and everyone we have ever been and always will be, and that this, actually allows the imagination to stretch on into new possibilities in the future which might have scared our more youthful selves to death. Ironically youth can be the home of shy conservatism, a lack of wildness and even an abstract distance from real intimacy, where years of difficult experience can make us beautifully raw and open to our selves; open to existence, to presence and to what we can become, with another, and with our selves; which an unsullied complexion and unlined eyes are unwilling to countenance and see. This all adds a new mystery and magnification to relationship that our younger selves were too often, too timid to behold or confront. We mature into a new kind of beauty that youth is not ready or able to inhabit. Mid-life woman (or man) you are not invisible to me. DW
…
Facing the Storm.
Photo © David Whyte
Pacific Northwest
October 2015
