My mother’s world was her garden.
Hybrid eggplants, tomatoes—Better Girls and June Pinks.
Bermuda onions, Whopper sweet peppers, Monkey Begonias, Ginger and Day Lilies. A hand-carried Bolivian climbing vine, Here-Today-and-Gone-Tomorrow,
reaching far into the recesses of her thoughts.
In her old age
my mother plants trees in her mind
Sycamore, Mesquites, and Catalpas. She collects seeds to plant.
You could plant this seed, you know, she says, stooping down to pick up
the Huisache pod from beside the road, her hand pressed hard on her cane
to pull her weight back up.
In her childlike world
she plants this seed . . . fanciful words blow it. Rays of sunlight strengthen it.
Furrows of my tears bless it . . . here in my mind.
From her garden porch in spring,
a robin wings this seed to land.
From Song of the Suburbs, soon to be published.