The Crone in this poem is an archetype — a symbol of the inner wisdom many women discover as they age. Whether we call her intuition, clarity, elderhood, or simply experience, she represents the truth-telling voice that grows stronger over time. E.Z.
December 12, 2025
The night before my 70th birthday, the door blew open.
No wind.
No footsteps.
Just a hush of moonlight bending across the floor—
and then her.
The Crone.
Wild-haired, wind-kissed, smiling like she’d been waiting centuries for me to
notice her.
A presence older than breath, older than prayer, older than regret.
A sight to behold.
She didn’t say hello.
She said, “Sit.”
Then she placed a warm, ancient scroll in my hands.
It felt alive, like something remembering me—
A kind of knowledge beyond anything the world ever taught me to doubt.
“Here,” she said.
“It’s your chart—the one you wrote before you arrived.”
I unrolled it, and she began reading my life aloud, like a prophecy I had forgotten.
“Sagittarius Sun,” she said first.
“The wanderess. The truth-seeker.
The woman who refuses to shrink.
You were born facing the horizon—bow in hand, arrow on fire.”
And I felt every border I crossed,
every life I reinvented,
every choice that carried me farther than expected
and sometimes farther than was wise.
Then she tapped another mark.
“Leo Moon,” she said.
“The performer. The Queen.
The one who sings her memories out loud.”
I remembered the stages that saved me,
the poems that stitched me back together,
the nights when sharing my voice was the only prayer I had left.
“Virgo Rising,” she continued.
“The healer. The priestess.
You see into people, not around them.
You repair what you can—
even when the broken thing
is you.”
And then she touched the center of the chart.
“Chiron in Aquarius, Fourth House,” she murmured.
“Your holy wound.
Born different.
Born outside the gate.
Born to build home from your own bones.”
Something inside me shifted.
Something old.
Something I’ve carried since childhood—
The feeling that my whole life had been shaped
around a stake I never knew was mine to bear.
Then the Crone leaned closer.
“This isn’t your first fire.”
She touched a blank place on the scroll—
the part with no symbols, only memory.
“You have carried water before,” she whispered.
“Barefoot on dusty roads,
bringing hope to a fevered child who didn’t live.”
A grief I have never spoken rose in my throat.
“You once wore a veil,” she said.
“A woman of God who knew too much.”
I felt a sharp ache—
familiar, ancient.
“And you walked beside women
stoned in the streets for being themselves.
Witch. Midwife. Seer.
Every woman they burned
rose again as intuition.
And you—
you were one of the first to rise.”
I didn’t argue.
My soul remembered before my mind did.
Then her voice changed.
“Now hear this,” she said.
“You did not walk through this life as a saint.
You walked through as human fire.”
My heart tightened.
“Your Sagittarius longing uprooted small hands that trusted you.
Your quests, your reinventions, your hope-heavy moves—
you lost more than money along the way.”
I breathed—slow, painful, honest.
“Your Leo fire burned bridges, too,” she said gently.
“You loved deeply.
And when love no longer fed your spirit,
you left.
Not out of cruelty—
but out of truths too heavy to speak.”
Then she softened,
her voice moss over stone.
“Regret is not a sentence, she said.
“It is not an evaluation of your failures.
It is simply a memory of moments
your soul wishes it had held differently.”
Something in me loosened—
A need I had never named until she spoke it.”
A forgiveness that didn’t erase the past—
but blessed it.
The Crone rolled the chart,
pressed it to my chest,
and said:
“Go live it.
Go roar it into the world.
Your chart is not your fate—
it is your permission slip.”
And just like that—she was gone.
A whisper of marigold.
A scent like old parchment and better worlds.
I stood in the hush she left behind
and finally said aloud,
“I am not finished yet.”
Because turning 70 is not an ending.
It is the unveiling.
