Old Women Everywhere

Let’s talk power.
After Last Blood,
the years stretch
in freedom and in pleasure,
longer than the Years of Bleeding;
ten, maybe twenty years longer.

First we met the power;
then, for decades of our lives, we learned
how to use its flares and fires.
Now, conversion! When the power,
the power of kept-blood
is offered steady as the sun.

The longest cycle of our lives
is not yet honored
with a name.
It’s invisible, how can we say
what it is, what it feels like,
what it brings?

Call it The Broadening Time,
think of the Lasithi Plain on Crete,
broad as the eye can see, a treasure
of the upper elevations,
endless harvests of fruits and grain.
Think a time of bounty.

Call it the Conversion Years,
when we settle into
our true Selves,
and make no bones about hiding
the power that makes us
Keepers of the vision.

Get out of the way, we say
to those not ready to see
humans evolve to luminous.
Get out of the way, we say
to those with vision so impaired
they can’t see past their lives.

Let’s talk power. Multitudes
in their Conversion Years are here–
Let’s talk postmenopausal power!
We are myriad, get your fears
out of the way, start rebuilding
what has been destroyed.

Let’s make it visible, the time
when females full of age and power
take back the world for all of us.
Conversion Years, the time
when old women everywhere
turn the world back to love.

©Susa Silvermarie 2019

Isela González is head of the Sierra Madre Alliance, an organization that has defended indigenous rights in Mexico’s Sierra Tarahumara for the last 20 years.