Mother's Day Poem by Ernest Hilbert

She stalks the May yard,
Mewing for her kittens,
Two black like her,
Under the slanted iron fence,
Toward the ravine behind,
Crammed with bald tires
And the dull fires of tangled
Wire rusted into bonnets.

The orphaned crown of a bird's nest,
Torn from our eave
By a storm, lays a wrecked knot
Of twine and twig in the gutter.

On the cracked porch
The remaining slivers
Of a broken mirror glint where
The brush missed them
Last season.

The mother moves
Like a shadow along the edges
Of the yard, a helpless curl
Of fur in her jaws.