Peggy Hammond

Early Morning, Café in Barcelona

Secrets

When we are nine, we play
croquet on the lawn; we don’t
know rules, just hit colorful balls
through wire brackets.
Tobacco fields around us, stalks heavy
with leaves but today is Sunday
and our parents say god doesn’t
like work this day.
Our fathers toss horseshoes under maples.
Metal clangs and their laughter
rise and race to white clouds
streaked across the bluest sky.

Somehow I hear your mother
whisper to mine you cannot nap
alone. She must stand guard, form
a wall around you.
She cuts her eyes to your father;
my mother shakes her head.

 
Later when I cross through your bedroom,
my feet hurry. What lives here that stops
you from sleeping by yourself?
Against your pillows, a doll with
tangled hair, one black shoe off, plaid
dress crooked, a stuffed tiger, plastic
eyes shiny as sunlight. 

When I reach the den, your father
is there. He hands me an orange popsicle,
says, it’s good, as your mother
calls my name, her voice loud and sudden,
hailstones in oaks. She stands in the doorway,
her face bleached as those clouds,
your father’s eyes as blue as the sky.

That night I dream a forest;
we hold hands, slip between pines,
weave their green needles into our hair,
declare ourselves sisters.
A hawk circles above us;
somewhere croquet balls collide and smack
while men laugh and throw lit matches.
Their eyes are feral, our skin
too tender for their hunger.
The hawk swoops close, whispers
run.

 
When I am seventeen,
I smoke a joint with a girlfriend in a field
behind her house. A hawk
lands in a dead tree then turns
into a woman on a white horse.
The woman has your face but my thoughts
are clumsy; they stray like ladybugs finding their way
through moss littered with leaves.
I can’t speak to you through this distance.

 
A week passes before I learn you are gone.
I hold my sadness close, like a small animal
I am comforting.

Grounded

My grandmother never learned to drive,
never flew in an airplane. Stayed
on that tobacco farm, grew a large family,
tended a large garden.
She and her mother made quilts to cover
five babies, stuffed newspapers in walls
for insulation against a drafty house.
She cooked breakfast early,
then started on lunch and supper soon after
while her husband worked the fields.

When my aunt talks of leaving home as a
young bride moving north, hundreds of miles
away, she marvels her mother didn’t make a fuss
or fanfare, just smiled around the words
visit when you can, then walked toward the pond dam
to the brimming garden beyond,
sunbonnet flopped on her gray hair, silver
pail swinging from her hand.

My grandmother saved her tears to baptize
tomatoes and beans,
let her daughter go into the world strong
and shining.