A Hill Mother

ARKANSAS POEMS

A HILL MOTHER

You have been the slow strength flowing

From stricken rivers.

You have been out, of eternities,

Beacon and harbor in storm.

Merged in the squalor and the emptiness

Of your kin, children of the mountains,

You have been a blossom reluctant to fade

But crushed at last beneath

The inevitable hills,

Yours is a world of drouths and floods;

In a dark cabin

Pine-clutched to a slope,

You have dreamed dreams among the skillets

And dingy plates and cups,

And have wrenched open a door

And seen despair leering at you.

You have wandered mornings

Out where the alder thickets

Tangled the fields with their stems;

You have chopped frenziedly at young

Poke-leaves for greens against stalking

Hunger.

You have cut poles into firewood

While the boys went fishin' down Big Bitter.

Out of the dark walls of your days

Uncertainty has crouched mocking,

Fear has sidled like a big tarantula.

Hedged by the weeds of futility,

Fenced by the rails of adversity,

You tremble and wait for the slow decline.

Pausing at your gate, I see you now

Slumped in the old chair on the old porch

Where the afternoon sun has ripened

On your listless hair and burned its way

Into your weathered face.

Chickens cackling hungrily in the yard,

Supper to fix -

With red hands limply suspended

Over the pan of potatoes,

Paring knife dropped to the floor,

You snatch a moment arrested

Out of the creaking wheels

Of bodiless time:

Sleep.