"Depression" (c. 1995)

Mama Myrtle

 

Her damp hair lay on coarse white sheets,

her flesh, blanched gray and pink after birthing,

froth on his minute mouth, flaccid on the nipple.

 

She stirred awake in her post-labor dream

to see red-fever blooms on Sarah’s cheeks.

The doctor’s miles away, Sam’s in the fields;

 

she called their eldest from her playroom games.

Round and round and ring-around the farmhouse,

Little Sue trundled her bundled wagon

 

keeping sister moving in cool sweet air;

crushed quick clover let its medicine scent

exhale under the rolling cradle where

 

Sarah beneath the flannel breathed her spirit bare,

and Myrtle pulled herself to rise

by her dead newborn as her daughter died.

 

                        ***

 

My mother says she was small, the seventh child

to grow up on Compromise, when her mother

first spoke of her hard-remembered grief,

the sister and brother my mother had never known.

 

In those days the fevers took little children.

Every parent had to know how to love

with fear of loss, how to hold the others after.

How old was I when Mama first told me?

 

Were my babies small or was I only

a child, my mother letting go story to me

as her mother had let go to her, girl

raised like a bubble on an apron string?

 

 

© Kathrine Durham Oldmixon

 

San Miguel de Allende 2008