New poem (first draft)

Singing From The Earth

This is the last place my mother

asks me to take her.

She is ninety years of age.

We pass through the water logged field,

the tall grass pasture and climb

the rutted pathway up.

Here is the country cemetery – few gravestones,

only flat standing rocks,

etched by long gone hands.

Here is the grave of her mother,

beside her father

and next to their youngest child.

Mother tells me she always wanted

to place a lamb monument here,

to remember the little sister she

does not remember.  The one she

could have mentored – could have led to Christ

the way her Sister Merle did for her.

Merle died young in childbirth

is buried somewhere in a California

grave my mother will never see.

This is the last stop on the cemetery circuit today

her last call with sisters, brothers, family,

a lifetime of memories singing from the earth.