When is the sentence? When the rule?

Is love only for the young? Passion denied after certain decade?

Does lying in the afternoon, tangled in our creased movement, somehow cease at certain juncture?

Removed and lost, replaced by sensible conversation and larger lunches?

No sag permitted? Desire given a codeword only known to the young?

Do ladies of a certain age still splinter into starlight and bursting, hold the rapture like a songbird?

I have seen wrinkled, grey women with pendulous breasts and spongy thighs

Take the best of a young man’s drawn in breath

With just one measured glance and turn of disobedient foot

Their steel hair aflame, the catapult of their sex burning on their jaunty lips curled in conquest

Surely there is no air left in the room

Surely he cares nothing of their scars and marks of life when standing over him

She is all woman

Full and robust like the wine he dares not serve for saving

She has no need of games or manifest

Hers is not a youthful, flighty, thinning regard

He will not love her for the firmness of her bosom nor quietly praise her convulsing hips

Instead, together they will turn ripe fruit to drink

And laughing, pour the marrow of meaning one from the other, sharing mouthfuls

A united confidence (we will both die one day)

A mutual understanding (but oh what fun we shall have till then!)

I see them

No longer shackled to status quo nor bound to social convention

Free as their clothes billow in the fulment of a second era

The one Jung promised held insight and yes

Abundance of desire, for we have laid down our vanity and gathered our applause

Lost in his ardent kiss and the meeting of them, drawn as one

Holding up the world and each other with humor and plucked string

Her smile reminds him of being twenty and then, not at all

Glad for his years and the sensation of her over him like a night time rose

Her perfume is from every corner, her touch a slow syrup poured in time to symphony

He is captivated by the folds her mouth makes

Eating pasta by firelight, cross-legged in mirth

She is at once the girl and the crone but most of all she is woman

Enfolding him inside herself like a conch with many windings

Her life can be told from the lines on her neck

There is the stillborn, there the hungry child pulling at her sore nipple, there the stretch of life roaming her stomach in silver marks

She smells like damsons picked late in the season

A little wild

He can lay himself down next to her and tell her his fears and she will listen

As she has walked this long on the same well worn road

Sometimes dancing, sometimes searching, always witness

He can dream whilst he rides inside of her without rebuke

She will submerge them both in her intuition till moon goes beneath cloud, silvery and wrapped in insight

When she cries out, he will bend to her need with the lesson of years and instrument

Not a young man with muscled body and formless brain

But a partner able to pleasure her with the depth he has finally sewn

Her eyes may wake red and tired but her laugh is deep and echoes throughout his day like ticker tape

Reminding him he has surely found at long last, a mate

And she, a friend, in this abyss of living, a hand

To clasp and be tugged back to life time and again

For theirs is more alive now than fifty years since

Running, slow and surely, after the dying brand of fire

Eclipsing the sunset with its incandescent glow

Her face enfused with light and he

Crying without knowing why, whispers in jagged pieces

His symphony of love

Then, now, eternal and beyond.

If I could give my younger self any advice it would be to say fuck off more often.” Helen Mirren.

47 Replies to “Then, now eternal and beyond”

  1. Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
    TheFeatheredSleep – Love, desire, and passion have no “Use By” date or deadline.

  2. When this vision comes true, we will have achieved equality and tolerance in every area, because this one is surely the last bastion of intolerance and inequality.

  3. AND my obsession with Helen Mirren is now unshakable. 😂
    Seriously, though, every line of this fills me with hope for humanity. ♥️

  4. That is just so beautiful. Every line is exquisite. I read it to Rex tonight in bed. He had tears in his eyes. He said “She is describing you Naomi!” I cried then too and kissed him.
    Thank you!
    Xxxx
    Naomi

  5. Hahaha! That was a great film! Here I was trying to show that age doesn’t either passion and I guess that’s as apropos an example as you can get. I loved that actress.

  6. Well said. And utterly the reason I wrote this. Couldn’t agree more. There is no official derth day though they’d have us believe otherwise. Thank you dearling for reading

  7. Women are still regarded as childbearers and/or objects of sexual fantasy. One is a mechanical function, like a toaster, when it breaks you get another one. The other is appearance, pure and simple, and women, seems to me, still fall for it, still think they can’t be ‘feminine’ unless they’re young and well set-up and aren’t afraid to throw all their clothes off to prove it. Stupid.

  8. You know what? I wrote this after reading your blog earlier in the day so you might want to tell your Rex that Naomi IS in that poem for I agree she is! And adore you for being the you that you are.

  9. Really? Wow! I dont know what to say! Rex said “well that’s a first!” So I punched him of course. Thank you. You write beautifully.
    XXXX
    Naomi (and Rex)

  10. This is beautiful! The writing as well as the relationship depicted. I only wish there were more men like this who didn’t body shame, who looked beyond the inevitable signs of age for a 25 year old that isn’t there anymore. ☹️

  11. Ah as ever you are so right and give me food for thought. So often we are sexual fantasy only to be shelved when a man thinks we are beyond our sell by date. WHO allows this? Women who put up with it as much as the men who do it! I feel lucky being a lesbian as I am well out of it but as a woman with more straight friends than gay, I see it and it still rankles – how ironic don’t they get it? Older women have something – possess something that is infinitely beautiful and valuable!

  12. I really, really appreciate you for saying that. I tried hard with this one and it was meant very much as an Ode to loving over a certain age. I may not be there yet, but we will all get there and I like the idea that we can be passionate and loving and joyful and living as fully then as now. I do so agree with you about the need for people, often men, to quit body shaming (as have they looked in the mirror lately?) and also to be more open and appreciative of women of all ages. It begins with us women appreciating ourselves and then if men do not, well that is their loss. I don’t have to worry being a lesbian but I have so many heterosexual friends who are effectively put on a shelf at a certain age it fills me with rage because they’re so beautiful and valuable and if men can’t see them they should come over to the dark side! 😉 Oh and you are so right about the 25 year old and anyway, it’s not bitterness if a woman can say an older woman is beautiful and that it isn’t just the perview of the 25 year old it’s the truth!

  13. It’s both the eternal youth syndrome and the idea that women have a sell by date. Youth is all that matters so you get the ridiculous scenarios of parents imitating their children in everything to keep cool and young.
    There’s no respect for anything other than appearances, and men still require that women ‘look’ appetising. The so-called feminists who go along with it are as deluded as the ‘feminists’ who approve of the burqa as ‘liberating’. They don’t do the movement any good at all, one step forward, three steps back.

  14. Eternal Youth Syndrome for sure. But why do men have it more than women? And yes, the idea a woman has a sell by date, an old (outdated) concept that still seems to gain traction unbelievably. And if we say that we are accused of being ‘bitter’ that we are not 25 any longer (phew!). So true. Because feminists can hurt women by putting rules up that don’t respect individuality, it’s democracy gone wild.

  15. I suppose there are several things at work, more than I’ve been able to work out, but there’s the worship of youth that applies to men and women, and the only thing the new feminists have done to change it is to give it a different slant—yes, buy the creams, the lotions, the products, the clothes, the surgery to keep looking ‘good’, but do it because you want to look ‘good’ for you, not for a man. Same old discourse, that good = young.
    Men buy the clothes, the products, eat the food, listen to the music, do the body building, but they also have the extension of sell by into middle age, because grey hair is distinguished in men, because men get wiser as they get older (women get stupider), they get more successful (women aren’t in that game anyway) richer, become more attractive.
    I think you’re right about the feminists not respecting individuality. They still impose the Beyonce Ariana Grande models of ‘beauty’ and call it feminist to admire them just for the way they look. A woman who wants to wear comfortable clothes, doesn’t dye her hair, wear makeup or give a flying fuck about being lusted after in the street is somehow giving the girls a bad name. The ideology’s all gone pear shaped. It’s all got mixed up with the trans debate too which I’m not going to get involved in because so much of it I think is absolutely wrong, mad and ludicrous.

  16. Loved this poem… Speaks to me on different levels …some happy and some sad per losing a love in my life, but happy in finding a new one again to have that intimacy of knowing a woman in all her loving ways ….from the richness of a smile on her, the tenacity of her spirit,… her enveloping me up in her passions and her bright eyes when directed at me. All that has never had anything to do with age… 🙂 Much Love sister… ❤

  17. I’ll let you hold the optimism for now. I’m going through a divorce at 47 and can’t yet be sure that, when/if I’m ready, there will be someone to share myself with. My faith in men’s ability to truly see other is shaken right now.

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