Tilth
November’s
rake, rasping over difficult ground--
it is mounded, where we buried our old
cat--
two bare handfuls of ash in a cedar
box.
Sometimes I
wake at night, hoping she’s not cold, there
as if I’d heard my father’s long-ago
raking,
his mother,
dead in the great flu;
left, when he was ten— how could he
bear that?
His voice, a fragile canopy; the
yellowed fig tree’s
falling,
piecemeal, Leave something fresh behind:
Bluebells, and the common snowdrop—white cloud
on sharp blue sky, in spring— My green
trowel’s
clumped with clay. I sprinkle food and fill this corner
where the earth slopes down.
They will drift loose. I have nothing to complain of.
Elizabeth
Biller Chapman