Joseph Powell

Widow’s Weeds

The winter’s exit was earlier than usual,
perennials nosing through the dirt, sunlight
like a healing hand, bird-silence erased

in fitful songs. My widowed mother
spends her declining years gardening,
her husband long planted like a bulb,

her children windcast seeds. Her friends mostly 
underground. Time is that sunlight a door closes on.
Dressed in an old blue down coat,

faded jeans, gloves, spattered white tennis shoes,
she loves the simplicity of weeding,
her arthritic fingers dig at their tenacity.

Each troublesome root-mass gets a good shake
the way regret, unabsolved, works at her,
what she’d said to her children, her husband.

She digs on dirty knees until the wheelbarrow’s full
and spills on the grass. When the sweat drips
from her nose and glasses fog, she goes in to warm

cold coffee, rests long enough
to resume rescue’s delicate work,
freeing the flowers from the tangle of winter.

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Joseph Powell has published seven books of poems, a book of short stories, and co-authored a textbook on meter in poetry. He is an emeritus English professor who taught at CWU. He lives in Ellensburg, WA on a small farm.