I grew up in a small south-western Alberta village. 

Freckle-Faced Home

garden of prairie  tinged with pollen
wheat chaff beaten in bowl belly sky
by wooden spoon of my grandmother
and father's ford tractor
spewing out dust and folding grain
into patchwork grids

earth swelters in august heat
fanned by poplar leavers aquiver
in ever-always west wind

gospel of grain's gold tablets
afire with Sunday's hymnal rest
straying down paths      leading
to a place of dropping one's sins
like old lady with floppy-flowered hat
sitting in choir seats
perusing the penitent girls
giggling in back pews
are flattened with her judgmental gaze

this is one of my homes
silo father      crouched house mother
woolen-sweater grandfather
long suffering grandmother
this remains buzz-bee beloved to me

frogs in irrigation ditches
swimming in shadows of man
cruising straight lines giving wide swath
to duck nests and killdeers    to pink mice
and tan children    prickle of timothy
blackbird's song of summer
stippled of sunfreckle faces
intent on gleaning suncity dreams

swallows sheet-sweep
sparrows swinging on lines
mother's shock-blued sheets
dancing in sweet clover breezes
girl dropped down
in tall prairie grasses
making rooms of castles
by stepping-down hallways
in her maybe-some-day diorama

nights heavy laden with mother's peonies
faint country music twanging
from one house to another
cricket click and frog-frothed ponds
sing in harmony with barn dove dirges
this was home      is home

long gone are neighbors    town shrunken in size
sagebrush hills and drop down gullies
snaking Belly river    carving out new names
I am no longer that girl    it is no longer familiar
we have changed into roundbale memories
stacked in a barnloft

home is heartheld    fondly sought for
lazysun remembrances    slabs in a cemetery
took our dreams with them
but it was a freckle-faced home    once

©Carol Desjarlais 7.14.14