I imagine them walking down rocky paths
toward me, strong, Italian women returning
at dusk from fields where they worked all day
on farms built like steps up the sides
of steep mountains, graceful women carrying water
in terra cotta jugs on their heads.
What I know of these women, whom I never met,
I know from my mother, a few pictures
of my grandmother, standing at the doorway
of the fieldstone house in Santo Mauro,
the stories my mother told of them,
but I know them most of all from watching
my mother, her strong arms lifting sheets
out of the cold water in the wringer washer,
or from the way she stepped back,
wiping her hands on her homemade floursack apron,
and admired her jars of canned peaches
that glowed like amber in the dim cellar light.
I see those women in my mother
as she worked, grinning and happy,
in her garden that spilled its bounty into her arms.
She gave away baskets of peppers,
lettuce, eggplant, gave away bowls of pasts,
meatballs, zeppoli, loaves of homemade bread.
“It was a miracle,” she said.
“The more I gave away, the more I had to give.”
Now I see her in my daughter,
the same unending energy,
that quick mind,
that hand, open and extended to the world.
When I watch my daughter clean the kitchen counter,
watch her turn, laughing,
I remember my mother as she lay dying,
how she said of my daughter, “that Jennifer,
she’s all the treasure you’ll ever need.”
I turn now, as my daughter turns,
and see my mother walking toward us
down crooked mountain paths,
behind her, all those women
dressed in black
Copyright 1998 © Maria Mazziotti Gillan. All rights reserved.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats
- Robert Burns: O Bonie Was Yon Rosy Brier:
- Tell me not here, it needs not saying poem – Alfred Edward Housman
- Алексей Толстой – Средь шумного бала, случайно
- The Banyan Tree by Rabindranath Tagore
- Robert Burns: The Trogger.: Heron Election Ballad, No. IV.
- Вера Павлова – Время уступать место
- Written In A Quarrel by William Cowper
- Михаил Лермонтов – Ах! Ныне я не тот совсем
- Алексей Хомяков – Ritterspruch – Richterspruch
- Михаил Лермонтов – Боюсь не смерти я
- Владимир Высоцкий – Михаилу Шемякину под впечатлением от серии “Чрево”
- София Парнок – Белой ночью
- Song by William Browne
- The Gyres by William Butler Yeats
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).