Daughter of Your Bones

by Janice Steinberg

Your hips are girded with titanium

lustrous screws threaded femur to acetabulum

Mine at seventy still shimmy, wiggle, bop

I teach dance on Zoom—I love to jump!

Yet underneath my booty-shaking sass

lurk your hipbones—friable, precarious

One gave way when you were eighty

you bounced back, a poster girl for therapy

But the second hip—you were so frail

a sneeze knocked you over and snap

Our mother line, small shtetl Jewesses

needed no Thera-bands, no leg presses

They lugged goods to market, hauled water from the well

their feet bunioned and bones like steel

Sitting at your bedside as hospice workers come and go

I imagine a field where they gather: those

grandmothers who gave us their birdlike frames

they wait for you, who lived beyond their dreams

I see you run to them, your legs whole again

a warble comes from their throats—you know this song

you join hands, dance, take wing.

Posted in Becoming an Elder, Growing Older, Hard Times
aging, hospice

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One Response

Muriel Dance says:

May 20, 2026 at 2:59 pm

How touching. How concrete. You acknowledge tenderly the increasing frailty of our human, female bodies.

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