Circle of the Remembered

Mrs. Palmer

She was a neighbor we visited.
Folk used to visit neighbors then.
Her house was redolent
with liniment and coal smoke.
Even the spring breezes,
could not pass the screen
against the smoke and liniment.
When she came to our house,
her liniment and smoke came with her
and lingered after she left.

Time and age had raddled her,
marking grooves in her cheeks
and whiskering her chin.
She might have modeled the witch
for a book of Halloween stories,
except her eyes were kind and smiling.

Once she gave me seeds
for Hubbard squash.
I scratched a hole in a cinder heap
with a bent-handled spoon to plant them.
Against all expectation, they grew
a squash for Thanksgiving
and made a lifelong gardener of me.

Long after, when she had died
in a home for helpless old folks,
a refugee from a brutal son
who drank her pension and beat her,
her obituary revealed she'd been a beauty,
whose son was born out of wedlock
to a prominent man who spurned her.
The old women of my house shook their heads.
"God forgive her," they said. "He knows
she suffered a bitter atonement."
We did not speak of her again.

Next Poem:  "Fred"
List of Poem Circles
Updated last on:  2001/05/25