Nebraska Wedding
For my Grandmother Rachel (1887-1977)
Daughter, go see what is keeping our Rachel
long past the time. Tell her
she must come down.
Mother, I saw sister Rachel was weeping,
weeping and staining the breast of her gown,
the beautiful gown from the East you've been saving,
your lovely lace gown you've been saving so long
for just this occasion you planned to be having
to settle her future. Now what can be wrong?
I remember a deep, cool corner
where the sod smell
filled my mouth like bread.
There I hid from hot
September sun
and there I stitched my dreaming
thread by thread.
Then as new as grass
I stretched my body
four ways, pressed against
an old, round hill,
heard the whisper of the earth
and trembling
learned a wind way and
a prairie will.
How these upright
white walls pinch and stifle
in September, this hot day.
Dear God!
Press me like a seed
into the prairie.
Let me grow as grass
in deep, cool sod.
Daughter, the guests are impatient and peeping
over their shoulders to see what is wrong.
Run and tell Rachel to stifle her weeping.
'Tis hot in the sun to be sitting so long.
The sun gets so hot afternoons in September.
Some have their chores to do. They must go home.
Tell your proud sister to kindly remember
if beauty were company, she'd die alone.
A perfectly suitable young man is waiting.
The honeymoon tent is set up on the lawn.
We must be done with this fickle debating.
Tell sister Rachel 'tis time to come down.
Kindling
This morning when the fog has folded in
around us on the island with its mild
and isolating chill, I hear the thin
wailing of a loon like a lost child.
A broken ladder, old broom handle, book
that no one's read since 1928,
news magazines not worth a second look
fuel the comfort leaping in the grate.
By nine o'clock, the sun begins to make
the emerald world around us reappear,
reflected in the shimmer of the lake,
the blue above the pines becoming clear
as time resumes, the artifacts we burned,
like everything, from dust to dust returned.
Barbara Loots resides with her husband, Bill Dickinson, and their boss Bob the Cat in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks since the 1970s. Her three collections are Road Trip (2014), Windshift (2018), and The Beekeeper and other love poems (2020). Along with other contributors to Pulsebeat, she often hangs out at lightpoetrymagazine.com. More bio and blog at barbaraloots.com.
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