Old woman, old, old woman,
you were an illusion of sunlight,
a slice of smoke
through draped windows.

What could you say
to the reporters
on your final birthday?
How you lived
100 years in an asylum,
how you shopped each morning
through two wars
like the grandmothers of Warsaw?
How you took lunatics for sweethearts
or lost your girlhood to a male nurse
while the century turned, and the sky
was lit by fireworks?

You wept a long wail of teeth
and turned away.