THESE LITTLE LIGHTS
In these scratched and snaky bulbs,
discovered this morning from their hidey hole,
marked X-mas in your hand, half-capitals,
half not, I can see way back.
Past cotton fields where you grew round
until you were laid up with the bad back
or lay down with child
By these little lights, I am led
to the eventual textile mill, the plant
that, as a child, I mistook for a living thing.
In my mind, Mama, these memories are mixed,
tangled worse than closet haunts can do
with the Bible song you had me sing,
trembling, before the Baptist congregation.
This little light of mine
This milky blue has a bum eye
like the mule you said Dad rode
to court you. It now fetches you again.
Each year we tried them, a child at
every third connection to keep them off the floor.
As they snarl on my carpet, with only me now
to hold up my corner of tradition, I hear your angry litany:
This string won't make it another year, resolved
as one loose red or green would short the set;
that found, another,
Despite your murderous threats, Mother,
none of us was scared.
Even then, we knew you didn t curse X-mas.
And I know this year I ll find
the loose connection.
For by these little lights
I finally see your heart.
And by your light of your ailing heart, I live.
Grape Jellying at the End of the Twentieth Century
Never will the grape be as sweet, the juice as hot
My hands will never stain and sting like this again
Everything I put by today , this whistling yellow-winded
Leaf-twirling day, will last until the change.
I must sustain my grip on this scalding bag
And wring the sweetness quite from the matted grapes.
And think, at the beginning of this last hundred years,
Women did not jelly for pleasure. Their wild currants
And tiny blue-black grapes had to last, to help keep
A family over four dark months out here on the plain.
They must have boiled until they could not stir down
While babies ran barefoot, picking up burrs and brambles
Had to sometimes drop the spoon from skimming
The froth that is the wild grape's last retort
And run to counter snakebite or aid the neighbor's birthing
There will never be a Fall again this century,
Never one exactly like this ever,
I taste history and future in this tangy sweet
Grandmother and great-great-grandchild together.
The jellying may never be this clear again.
Gay Davidson-Zielske (aka Norma Gay Prewett)