Darius Benhaim Poet Free verse

Cotton, Blood and Blue (DHR)

By four the light had already left the yard,
though nothing had moved to take it.
The cotton stood beyond the fence
its white mouths wide open to the cold.
On the porch the quilt had been left
across the back of a wooden chair—
blue squares, a faded red.

I touched one corner
and thought of my grandmother’s hands
that found a torn place without looking.
Somewhere a woman was still sewing—
or memory had made the difference
unnecessary. She stitched after supper
while the windows held their dark,
piecing shirts, dresses, work clothes,
whatever the years had left breathing.

Outside, October gathered itself
in the trees, leaf by leaf,
as if the earth knew something
about leaving without being gone.
I wondered what cotton remembers
once the field has forgotten its own name—
what blood keeps when the body has become
only the bruise on the road home.

The quilt lay quiet beneath my hand.
And suddenly the blue was not cloth.
It was my grandmother’s doorway at dusk,
my mother’s dress in a photograph,
the exact color of the bruise I never named,
the old songs that travel farther than the singers.
It was distance.
It was what remained
when there was nothing left to carry.

For a moment I could see
the years folded inside that chair—
not as history,
but one autumn leaning into another,
one pair of hands into the next,
each leaving something unfinished
for the next mouth to find.

The cotton in the field was almost silver now.
I stood there a long while,
holding no answer—
only the corner of the quilt
that I had been taught to see this way,
before I knew I had been taught.

Then the light went blue.
I folded the cloth once,
but not all the way.
Somewhere beyond the fence
the last leaves kept falling.
No place promised. No rest.

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