Squatters

John Barkley Hart

This August fourteen squatters
Are evicted from the levee:
A father, a mother, three daughters,
A handsome brace of sons and a slicky she

Dog. The mother who guarded
Well her violent brood
(Who let them bathe along the back bed
Of the Mississippi) is gathering up her hood

Of burlap and coming down upon
This violet day to walk
Among my mother's flowers and skirt the sun.
What a brilliant time to talk

With flowers: the moonvine,
Periwinkle, elephant ear,
Althaea and yellow flocks are all ashine;
The voice of the day is as clear

As the sound of a China cup
Breaking; and she is all alone
Centuries old drawing herself up,
An oriental in a field of stone.

How sad. Unequal to profundity
Of flowers, with more than twenty
Years upon her bush, she is strangely free
Of the crew who pluck her shanty.

That is perhaps the way it should be.
Life is cheap in China because there
Is too much of it. Here there is too little,
My mother opened the door and shook her hair.

The family moves along the levee.
Mother who has spent many hours
With her garden tools is steady.
She tucks the loam and weeds the flowers.