How many springs have passed
since she watched the first green shoots break from the earth
And the bright blooms unfurl?
A handful of the precious bulbs she’d planted in the fall
when first they’d raised the little cabin--
A token of hope, of making a home. Putting her mark on the land
Here I am and here I mean to be.
She cut switches of forsythia – yellow bells, they called them – from a neighbor’s plantings,
Box wood, too, and rooted them all in the damp earth beside the spring.
And in a few years, heavy with her second child, she set out the little plants – making it pretty around the cabin.
Young uns made hidey holes beneath the boxwood and brought her fistfuls of the daffodils.
That multiplied and spread with every year – like her own family
Moved off, most of them.
But they still returned – sometimes in, spring, with the daffodils
and sometimes for Decoration Day – when the piney flowers lifted their gaudy heads.
Long gone, that woman, that cabin;
But her mark remains.