Singing From The EarthThis 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.
