I am so impressed by Bela’s poems!
Here it is:
ooOOoo
Ungovernable
We need not allow age to define us
unless we hunger to be named
by something outside ourselves.
Mother Nature is as old as time,
yet remains a woman of mystery—
unmapped,
unmastered,
not to be taken lightly.
While many elders
have been pressed into a mold,
muffled by expectation,
cinched into compliance—
she rises.
She takes back her ancient names:
crone, hag, witch—
titles once meant to diminish,
now worn like iron and bone.
She will not shrink.
She will not bow.
Lately, she has been speaking.
Heavy tropical rains—
record-breaking—
islands flooding,
the ground unable to drink
what the sky insists on unleashing.
And today—
thunder.
Lightning.
Rare here.
Almost unheard of.
Rain fell in sheets,
fire-hosing off corrugated roofs
into earth already swollen,
already saturated.
And then—
CRACK.
FLASH.
BOOM.
The sky split.
The dog and I
jettisoned from our bodies—
he barking, pacing,
drawn to the door
but unwilling to cross the threshold.
This was not weather.
This was visitation.
The center—
ripped out of the moment,
out of the body,
out of the small illusion of control.
This is what elder women become
when the blinders fall away:
not gentle,
not contained,
not agreeable.
We become weather.
We become voice.
We become the force
that cannot be managed
by the structures that once confined us.
Ungovernable.
Unapologetic.
Unsilenced.
We rise—
not in defiance alone,
but in remembrance.
And we will not be silenced again.
ooOOoo
To my mind that is the power and beauty of nature – it is ungovernable.
Learning from Dogs 