Ode To Mrs Miller

I did not know how brave she was, ninety-two, and I, seventy less... so young that old age was textbook stuff: a fact of life, but not mine. I was alive and free to stride the world, a colossus of youth-- whereas she had ate almost a century: and all her friends and all her family lay dead somewhere, except in her mind, still crisp, poignant in its memories... of a wealthy husband, a daughter dead young, her own youth and her beauty remaining lonely in a silver-framed photo. She never complained, this old lady--never once did I hear lamentations, a bewailing for the lost richness of life: that ripe fullness she must have once felt as a wife, a mother, a woman of grace and beauty, a living queen in her time. Now she lived alone in a cold basement flat, standing barely five feet tall--yet I've never known any being braver. But it is only now, when I am become old myself, that I envy such courage. [rec'd n/a in Brian Strand's #2 contest, judged 6/29/20]