Garden Hat

Grandma’s old straw hat

rides low on her brow.

When hilling potatoes,

sweat rings the brim.

Twine provides a strap.

Sometimes, when a gust

tumbles past tomatoes

and green onions,

a calloused hand

pushes the hat back

to feel deliverance

from summer rays.

The brim shades a spot

two-feet wide over

thick-skinned Half Runners,

caresses long weepy

leaves of corn when she

brushes past, edges tattered

by forty years of okra stalk

shaving flesh and straw.

Ice water renews

her will under hat and sun;

as winds feign,

wrinkled fingers hold

fast to its lip, beating

hot air cool around a weary face. 

When crickets serenade,

the hat becomes a bucket

for the day’s last peppers.

Today, a ‘For Sale’ sign greets;

the gate swings wide.

In the shed a plow sits idle

while the straw companion

hangs from a nail.

A swig of gas in the tiller,

brim shading my brow,

sweet soil tumbles over tines,

my sweat mixes with hers

under the garden hat.

 

Reviews

[Mark]

This speaks beautifully to the debt you owe your departed Gran, and by inference, to the wisdom we learn whether we were trying to or not, merely by observing those who learned how to be human largely because they had no options. Today, we, who have so MANY options, are, in my opinion, far lesser people than they. You see, I, too, have worked in the garden (nearly two acres of it) with my gran, grandfather in my case, and hardly a week passes but I realize that I am doing something as he did, or would have. More importantly, hardly a DAY passes but what I realize how far I have missed the mark. Thanks for the poignant memories your delightful poem has evoked, Todd.