Above Rocks, Retirement

These are the places that time, forgot.

That history and memory etch into emerald canopies over mud floors.

Cast iron burns hotter, in dutch pots that wear scars as old as

Her hands and mine,

which after all this time, still cannot scrub as hard as

hers – so smoke smears and stains still remain

on dresses and drapes.

Breezes call me to gullies deep

so I follow nature’s litter.

Trails of coconut leaves and gourds –

empty caskets that we once drained in refuge from the relentless sun.

My childhood is repainted through eyes that remember

her hands, at work

and the time it takes to

turn nothing,

into something,

and her story

into my own.