TWO POEMS

 

by Colleen S. Harris

                           

                                                            

MEMORY QUILT

 

Start with patches of color, generous

as the Scots and Germans who made

their homes in these mountains

and became my great-grandmothers.

The smell of a woodstove staving off

snow, of bread tasting like grassy

valleys and looking homemade. Hold it

together with the sound of bare feet

on rough paths up mountains, the rackrattle

of granddaddy’s coal-colored cough.

Sew it all with my mother’s gnarled fingers

threading the needle without help,

even when she could not make out my face

in the deep deafness of blind eyes.

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WHEN THE SCENT ON THE AIR CHANGES

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from exhaust to manure

I know I am almost home.

A clean smell, it chimes

in spring air like my mother’s

voice announcing dinner, or

the sound of my father’s pickup

rumbling up the drive. A green

smell deep as a cow’s calm eyes,

friendly like line-dried laundry,

that says the crop is plentiful

and flowers will march like armies

through rich fields. It climbs up

the trellis and takes me home,

says this is a healthy place for growing.

 

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Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (Main Street Rag, forthcoming), Babylon Songs (First Bite Press, forthcoming), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010; Doubleback, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), and chapbooks That Reckless Sound and Some Assembly Required (Pork Belly Press, 2014).