Folk Life
What will they sing of this morning
The women passing by
Coming down from the dry mountain
On their way to the city?
What long time memory
Surrenders the heart in songs?
What joy, what expectation
Through dim brown of dawn
Through the soft bodied mist
Perfumed with fragrance
From the whoring of the trees
With sun?
They carry baskets brim laden
With all the earnings of a season
Between the time of clearing the land
The sweet urge of sowing
And patient tending of what was growing
Out of their purpose,
Some kind of dream illusive before
Some hope of making something
Of the self better than the self
From the anxious reaping
In the back bending sun
To the market of doubt and faith
And relief
That for now its done.
The plans will change again
Children bring sudden emergencies
They do not plan for ...
And yet all of that is carried
In the basket of a song.
I remember lying there
In the passion of the mango season
Hearing the fruits drop
Thinking of them sweetly
Like Melveta
Coming through the guinea grass'
Spindly trail
Melbourne held her hands there
The yellow girl
And the brown boy
The certainty of money
In the color of love
What was I thinking
In my heart without a song?
O not this
Not here in the superficial wilderness
Not this journey
From which my being long
For women coming down the morning
In the mountain of a song.
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