Old women eat curb-side blackberries
honeyed with dust and car exhaust.
They are stained with berries...
black birth marks.

They are never satiated.

They dare the dragonflies of metal
for the taste of juices provided by
a generous God.
Ground-fall pears are ambrosia
to old women who go to bed hungry.
Full bellies are a vague sizzle of memory.

Old women walk the earth
dropping bread crumbs to lead the next
Old Mother who needs to find her way..

A whiskey bottle thrown from the freeway
grazes the temple, to explode into
granular road-sugar.  She picks
stray pieces of amber from her hair...
just as delicately as she plucked berries
from their hairy, clawed vines.

Old women pray for darkness
so they can lie down, swaddled
in cardboard, wrapped in blankets of denial.

Old Women never surrender.  They endure.
Old women endure.