Poems for ME -- part III

Mother Poet
for Mary Etta Perry

I haul my little poems up to you
on your Pisgah mountain top. You,
with your hair white as chalk, nurse skin-
bruises on peaches, on calves, and retell
those stories that most carry with tight fists.
You’ve lived long enough to find
a church community that will sanction
your coming out party that coincided
with the celebration of thirty years together;
long enough that you can tell the story
of that uncle who raped you in childhood
because you’ve outlived any of the family
that might care; long enough to read me
a poem about a brown girl you once loved
but were forbidden to befriend because it was Florida
and because it was 1945.

The 50 years that separate us, highlighted
by the buzz of your electric armchair
and gold handled cane, wash away
during conversations about how the academy
is ruining me, and how the urge to throw
a baseball keeps striking your poetry,
discussions that make our partners run
for cover, or at least a glass of wine.
As you read me the yellow aged story
of washing overalls in a washtub
or of the swallow that keeps showing up
every morning, I wonder which stories
will amaze my daughter poet when I have one.

From you, I learn to write my stories
so that when that little girl, not yet born,
comes to me when I can no longer
hike to the falls at Moore’s Cove,
I will remember myself as am now:
woman, still becoming, not yet formed.