Our Back Yards by Bruce Taylor
I’m reading Truck: A Love Story by Michael Perry and he talks about gardening quite a bit. He quoted Bruce Taylor as a writer of gardening poems (in Pity the World).
Our Back Yards
By Bruce Taylor
The morning after the funeral
Doris carries her grand-daughter
through the garden that has joined
the two houses for more than forty years.
She coos as she walks the child
in and out of the shade,
“These are my mother’s
hibiscus, her hyacinth, hydrangea.
This is the chair.” She sits
and I hear how her mother
used to sit with her and hold her
and sing, but Doris doesn’t.
I sit on my own back stairs,
new again to this kind of living,
new it seems to me once more
to everything, and wait
for my own mother to die
some thousand miles away,
my own baby daughter held
for this moment beside me
my boy, five, playing
with trucks in the dust
at my feet, looks up
and asks,
“How sad will you be
when your momma dies?”
“Show me,” he says,
“show me with your hands?”
WAYY’s on her kitchen radio
and her kitchen window’s open.
September is “Nostalgia Month”
and sometimes we’re almost ashamed
at how little it takes to make us happy.
