This week’s poem, by Jo Radner, likens the wrinkling of our aging skin to the evolution of the earth’s topography. I love this poem’s rich imagery of hills and vales, “jowls and bags,” and its resolution to be a “willing trekker” over this ever-changing land. 

Radner lives among the ghosts of her ancestors in their home region of western Maine, where she listens for stories and finds poetry in the woods and waters and in the tensions between pastoral peace and world violence. Writer, storyteller, poet, folklorist, her most recent book is “Wit and Wisdom: The Forgotten Literary Life of New England Villages” (UMass Press, 2023).

The countryside of age is made of wrinkles

The countryside of age is made of wrinkles.
Skin, once supple, taut, elastic,
hangs loose in folds and lines,
topography of a new continent.
Valleys deepen, hillocks sag,
gravity has never been so grave.

I make the map as I explore
the symmetry of jowls and bags,
the linkages of paths and patterns,
the new routes I must travel.
Dear God, make me a willing trekker
in this landscape, a ready voyager
by bogs and boulders, around blind turns,
curious and spry until the end.

– Jo Radner

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The countryside of age is made of wrinkles,” ©2025 by Jo Radner, appears by permission of the author.