For My Farmer's Daughter Poem by Daniel Thomas Moran

For My Farmer's Daughter
for Karen

She says she
hates the gardening,
but she loves the
new greens and all
their tender blossoms.
It is something like
how she hates the
winter, but loves the
magic that is snow, falling
and falling all afternoon.

In the autumn she
loves how the hills
slowly surrender to
the rising color,
but she is
disquieted by all the
death, and the utterances
of loss expressed by the
drying crackle of litter.

Maybe it is
the steep recall in a
pain felt in the knees,
or how the soil
finds its way into
the swirl of a fingertip.
Maybe it's the short
light, and deepening cold,
maybe time spent to
fret over whether the
birds of our summer
are safe somewhere, and

Wondering through
many November days,
who is feeding nectar to
our ruby-throated children
on their long, long descent
down the hemisphere.

I remind her that
she is a farmer's daughter.
I remind her how once
she spent the long flat days
defying the Minnesota wind,
tending to pens filled with
eggs and white chickens.

And she explains
that it was her imagination
that came along to save her,
one purple day when she
was very young, and first
noticed that the sky was
a giant over her head, and
the roads in every direction
seemed to go the very
same place.

So, now we
are of that age when
complaint is a currency,
where nothing at all
seems the way we think
we remember it.

But, we have found
a place and it is ours,
where we must be grateful
for even January, and for
the line of black beneath
our nails, and the ache
in our knees which reminds
us we are alive, and that
the gardens we've made
beckon to be watered,
yet again.

2018 Daniel Thomas Moran