Day 27 - 30 Poems in 30 Days

The Women Gather

The girls (women now), come home again.

Here where our fathers and mothers
gathered love and laughter
plentiful as the eggs Grandma
used as an excuse to marry our Grandfather
when she was 15.

This is the land our parents hoed,

toiled for sustenance.
Lived by milk from a single cow,
the drought or plenty of summer gardens,
mornings of more chores,
nights beneath home-made quilts

Here where they hired themselves out

for maybe a dollar a month
to support their mother,
widowed when baby Glenn was two,
illiterate because she was female

What ties us together 

cannot be contained in this poem.
It’s about blood,
about Hill Grover Cemetery,
our names carved on stones.
The coming together

to honor something imperceptible

yet solid and unbreakable.
Though miles and our own families
separate us daily we gather again
just to breathe together - the same air
as our mammas and our papas.