Poem of the Week

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When out from Lancaster’s womb,

my mother wrapped me

in a patchwork quilt of tobacco, corn, and barley fields.

Her manicured geranium and marigold beds

hemmed in my playpen yard.

Years later, when cicadas chittered and whirred

from the locust and the maple in stereo,

their empty nymph shells became imagination’s playthings;

my hand skimmed them across the dry-summer grass to other worlds.

Armed with a mason jar in the settling evening,

I pursued fireflies;

white cats leapt pirouettes after their dying glow.

Bats dove kamikaze style

toward hurled stone missiles in their path.

Those nights, camping tentless in the shadowed yard,

my back pressed against sheets soaked in the dank-dew grass,

the starry night speckled through the concord arbor leaves.

Along with the Pleiades, those seven sisters,

I heard the bullfrog’s deep croak from my father’s pond

and the crickets chirping in the cocklebur brush

warn as I drifted off to sleep,

“Do not forget us.

Do not forget.”