Muy Vieja Mexicana

Alice Corbin

I've seen her pass with eyes upon the road --
An old bent woman in a bronze-black shawl,
With skin as dried and wrinkled as a mummy's,
As brown as a cigar-box, and her voice
Like the low vibrant strings of a guitar.
And I have fancied from the girls about
What she was at their age, what they will be
When they are old as she.  But now she sits
And smokes away each night till dawn comes round,
Thinking, beside the pinyons' flame, of days
Long past and gone, when she was young -- content
To be no longer young, her epic done:

      For a woman has work and much to do,
      And it's good at the last to know it's through,
      And still have time to sit alone,
      To have some time you can call your own.
      It's good at the last to know your mind
      And travel the paths that you traveled blind,
      To see each turn and even make
      Trips in the byways you did not take --
      But that, `por Dios', is over and done,
      It's pleasanter now in the way we've come;
      It's good to smoke and none to say
      What's to be done on the coming day,
      No mouths to feed or coat to mend,
      And none to call till the last long end.
      Though one have sons and friends of one's own,
      It's better at last to live alone.
      For a man must think of food to buy,
      And a woman's thoughts may be wild and high;
      But when she is young she must curb her pride,
      And her heart is tamed for the child at her side.
      But when she is old her thoughts may go
      Wherever they will, and none to know.
      And night is the time to think and dream,
      And not to get up with the dawn's first gleam;
      Night is the time to laugh or weep,
      And when dawn comes it is time to sleep . . .

When it's all over and there's none to care,
I mean to be like her and take my share
Of comfort when the long day's done,
And smoke away the nights, and see the sun
Far off, a shrivelled orange in a sky gone black,
Through eyes that open inward and look back.

From: Rittenhouse, Jessie B.
The Second Book of Modern Verse (1919).

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This collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis.
Collection © 1999-2002 Jone Johnson Lewis.

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