Reunion
       

My grandfather stands on the front porch
Watching the dogs come back, reassembled

From hair, grit, eyeteeth. Again
The twin mares browse by the fence

In their brown-dust coats. Nobody asks
What they mean, appearing so suddenly.

In the back yard, the almost-forgotten
Dead — grandmothers in button shoes,

A lost baby, never named —
Stay buried. It's not their overshoes

Lost in the grass behind the smokehouse.
Not their faces alive in anyone's

Memory. But my mother waits
In the pecan tree's fingered shadow:

A girl, still. A second daughter,
Straight hair braided tight.

Barefoot on the bare earth.
Holding a broken milk jug full

Of daylilies. Hesitating,
Needing someone to say, this once,

It's all right to be born now,
Now is as good a time as any.

Next month we'll find my grandfather's glasses
In their case beneath the front seat

Of his Oldsmobile. Goodness, my aunt will say,
As if it were a matter of his

Mislaying them. As if we all ought to
Want to give them back, as if

We'd missed our shot at absolution.
Suppose, though, the soul pauses

As it undoes its last buttons.
Looks back at us, framed in light

Behind the screen door. And we
Who are left step out into

This death, to be remembered.

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Copyright © 2020 Sally Thomas All rights reserved
from Motherland
Able Muse Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission