Best Motherautumn Poems
By chance, I found them, there...
Three pressed leaves, with brittle veins of delicacy
Tucked between the pages
Of a tattered book of poems
Overlooked and gathering dust,
A cover worn, with broken spine
It had your names, an autumn date,
With script inside, a faded time...
Caressed in yellowed tissue, these three from ancient trees
Discarded long ago from russet crowns
A memory, kept, of time, so keen,
Of a long ago, brisk autumn day?
Where leaves had fallen so bold and gay, then twirled on down
From breezes that gently made the Sycamores sway
A place you walked and held his hand, and knew forever your love would be
Perhaps beneath those trees you made a plan for me
When winter's chill and stolen years had not yet come
Where fragrance of fall and new young love was found
From soft carpets of scarlet, red and brown
You chose these three from all the rustling hordes that grew
A tree had finished using them, in remembrance of you
They were yours for awhile...for your love, perhaps a lover's bed
now....here in my hands they lay....
They are mine to to keep, pressed leaves,
To keep for now, close to my heart instead...
She had beautiful hands, I remember
Strong and brown and crude under the choking lamplight
that wintry autumn of the potato blight
I saw them cringe and turn over and over
She thought I’d fallen asleep, but no
I watched her silently in the dark, well past midnight.
Her hair was rich and long, I remember
Coarse and uncombed and tangled on sweaty afternoons
One sweltering midsummer before the monsoons
we crouched in the fields and together worried
Masses of hair spidered across her wet cheeks
Sweat or something else, running down those weathered prunes.
She had eyes like the sea, I remember
Stormy and clouded and murmuring of a shipwrecked sorrow
That spring day the wind swept away the morrow
she stood with her back to me and hung her head
I saw her weak frame jolting and stiffening
and my infant heart was splintered by an invisible arrow.
Her voice was a melody through the reeds, I remember
For fifty years her lips could give only sighs
Unbroken silence shivering beneath frozen skies
Her throat rippled when she looked at my blossoming face
Quivered and quivered in a song of muted melancholy
Then one day away she flew, like a flower, without goodbyes.
He introduces her as his first wife
As if there are many more yet to come
For over fifty years now
He’s had this silly fun
She goes away on some weekends
To catch up with her friends
He says she’s at widow practice
His joking never ends
Seven children they have raised
One, too early left this world
Now over a dozen grandchildren
Add to their life some special thrills
He says the marriage will never last
They are too much not alike
She just shakes her head and smiles at him
As another day turns into night
They have reached their autumn years
These two peas in my parental pod
When he repeats his many awful jokes
We just give her a knowing nod