It must have been those long walks down country lanes,
daisies and black-eyed Susans separating dirt path from farmland,
your small hand reaching up and held in your mother’s loving grip
like a flower just picked. Every now and then
she let you run ahead to throw a clump of soil
back into the field from which it came,
where a family’s livelihood lay hidden,
cotton and tobacco crops depending on
the right amount of rain at just the right time.
Sometimes she let you walk barefoot,
usually nothing dangerous out there to step on,
broken glass on concrete miles and a world away.
At times she would lift you safely across
a normally dry creek bed swollen with water flowing
from the wet-weather spring. I wonder what
she talked to you about during those once or more
weekly trips. Did she tell you that hard work
and keeping your word were always most important,
even if they didn’t pay? Did she say
that hard times would come and like Joseph in Egypt
you would have to plan ahead? Whatever it was,
she must have gotten through.
Maybe she sang songs of joy
along with songs of sadness,
teaching you to love life and yet beware.
I think someone said that the only perfect human
tis the one nobody knows, and that’s probably true
with maybe a few exceptions. Anyway,
that must have been it, those long walks
down country lanes.
Correction: this poem was originally published online with the wrong title and under the byline of Tricia Gates Brown. Our apologies for the misattribution.
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