What All Of The Kings Have Made Her Do Poem by Robert Rorabeck

My mother doesn't play baseball:
She does the laundry—her eyes follow all of the heavens
The trails my father left across the
Rebar and sycophantic toads to go picking with
The rest of the knights in the orchards,
Having taken with him the last of our dromedaries,
But that is not why my mother weeps or doesn't
Wear any shoes:
The open extension cord has bitten her naked ankle
So many times it looks like a birth mark
And it doesn't care—the heavens send down tiny
Sparks that pirouette like little Chinese houses
For new years—and the iguanas roll and splay pot bellied
In the rock garden, nostrils flaring from
The perfumes of the night blooming jasmine:
Why she is desperate next to the blue Cadillac with electric
Doors is because she is waiting for it to rain
And for a young boy, maybe her son, to climb down
From the cross and lay like all of the weeping holidays—
Giving back to her what the thieves have stolen,
And what all of the kings have made her do.