HALLOWS by Kathryn Stripling Byer

1.

These leaves at my window,

death-speckled black oak and blood maple,

fall to the earth into which

she was sealed, leaving me

to imagine I see through the hollows

of what were her eyes how another day

breaks on the backs of the scrub pines

that stand up to welcome it.

2.

She was no saint.

She never fasted,

and if she prayed,

I never heard her

aside from the Lawsy

she uttered as down

she sank onto the dark

of the chamber pot

while I tried to be sleeping.

She stirred up the fire

to roar every morning and beat

the dough smooth, shoved it into the oven

to bake and be eaten.  When I hear Pavarotti

sing Panis Angelicus, I see her hands 

deep in the dough bowl,

and I hear the fire in the stove rumble,

I hear her chuckling and sighing,

she who could never on this earth 

deliver unto any table a dry piece of cornbread,

whose old-fashion cakes 

that lay solid as flesh on the plates 

put to shame every paper-thin

slice of town ladies' angelfood cakes.

(Any honest-to-god-angel

would have preferred them,

a dollop of whipped cream atop

every thick slice and after that, oh,

just a touch of her Christmas divinity.)

3.

Los Muertos.  The dead.

They are out there this morning,

in the woods with the busy squirrels

laying up treasures on earth,

this heaven of acorns and walnuts.

This granary.

These last dawns before the leaves go,

I wake early to watch from the widow

my dead ones out there in the wood

leaf by leaf come

to rest on the ground

where at last they have nothing

to say beyond what's meant

to lie on the earth and be claimed by it.

Previously Published in Southern Poetry Review.
From COMING TO REST, Louisiana State University Press