Today's poem is by Elizabeth Crowell

Late Afternoon
       

We passed the hunched foundations
of stone-walled houses, the whistlewood,
the trillium, the trough-dried remains
of the iron-hauling Morris Canal.

A green and white tent arched,
in the middle of a field.
as if for a church revival.
Our car lurched to a tippy stop.

My mother said, "hold on."
She got out — floral dress, white sneakers,
straw purse on one wrist, moving toward
the baskets of Jersey tomatoes

and tables with toppling corn.
My brothers and I looked around
at acres of flat fields, half-harvested,
sunflowers bowing at the red barn.

My mother talked to strangers more than us
and from her waving hands,
and frown-glare at an open husk,
I could tell she was sharing

her thoughts about ripeness and rot.
When she got back in, we wound along,
the muddy Passaic River by stores
that sold worms and bullets.

This happened maybe a dozen times
in only a few years, but you know
how memory is, quick to find a refrain,
and I am at its mercy to hum along,

my brothers distant, my mother dead,
the Passaic eroded, the farmlands
all bloomed with houses,
my own life almost past, the cancer

rooted like memory's hard bud,
and this is what I have of it,
our six knees touching in the backseat,
as the summer deepened.

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Copyright © 2023 Elizabeth Crowell All rights reserved
from Pembroke Magazine
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission