Maureen Thorson


Shore Leave, July

On Sundays, I’d wake

to the sound of the Toyota

pulling from the drive.

I’d imagine you then—

shooting down the highway

lined with big box stores,

their quiet parking lots

a kind of church

tacky with spilled soda.

An hour later, you were back

with the flimsy, careful box that held,

as always, eleven donuts—

powdered and plain and powdered again.

And the one for me, your eldest daughter—

glazed, the honeystuck heart of the bunch,

moonround and drumtight,

puckered as a kiss.

 

The Poppies, the Grandmothers

Petals as oily-soft

as a grandmother’s hands,

as red as lips after WWII,

riveters

playing femme fatale

in the land of danger and plenty.

 

Like grandmothers,

these blooms can make you sleep,

their pollen a factory of bedtime stories. 

 

Like grandmothers, they mean remembrance, 

blowing their short lives away

in the fields of great wars.

Each stalk stands for a soldier down.

 

Each grandmother for one who came home,

bought a Buick, earned a pension, ate steak

until the heart attack that felled him 

like an oak in a hundred-year storm. 

 

But still the poppies bloomed

from their strange green nut-like buds

and the grandmothers remained, ladling

soup from vast pots like cauldrons,

lighting Virginia Slims at kitchen tables

and recollecting the fields around them,

counting forth the lost and saved,

each grandchild, each hillock,

each seed and each ocean,

 

before drying up like history itself,

before crumbling like paper, 

like all books read too often,

improperly and lovingly kept.