Very much a draft of Day three
Boxes of Silent Lore
Meandering memories bump up against
Pictures, snippets of 8mm,
Old letters, brown and fading
Crumbling albums of glue and gloss and loss.
Boxes brimming,
Drawers and bins
Shuffle themselves
Each time we ramble through them
To find a clue about some long dead ancestor
Or one recently remanded to heaven:
mother, child, landscape.
Oh, here are three pictures of my great grandmother.
One before she married that Christmas Eve, age 17,
wearing a lovely handmade dress.
One on her porch in Tulare, age 42,
In dark cotton and holding a broom.
One a contemplative side shot of an aged gray head;
She is dressed in silk and black lace, reading a book.
Piled up under these glimpses into her life,
Her divorce proceeding,
court report, receipts,
old deeds to little farmland houses.
Each image appears to be about to talk,
but remain silent, reserving judgments,
resentments, nods of approval.
In each picture, her hands are still,
In unlikely repose.
Those were the hands that
Milked and plowed and sewed,
Kneaded and whipped and wiped the
Noses of ten children, and later
Pulled my mother from her mother’s womb.