ManicDDaily

Oddly Enough Why My Mom Is a Lifelong Democrat (Hay Knife, Fear Itself)

When my mom was young, she fell,
wearing bunged-up shoes,
upon a hay-knife.

A hay knife
is what it sounds like–triangulated
blade in the bales, blood
gobbed, swept them shocked
to doctor’s, neighbor’s car so fast

she did not see until at last
among the wired instruments
that her own mother, in panting flash,
had pulled a dress inside-
out
over her work clothes, the seams
dissected veins, the backward buttons clotted
knots in flapped
gaps–she

was horrified.

For she knew that town
was down
on the poor, those (like them)
who lived
in rattled houses with
chapped
barns.

And what
would the doctor
think, and how–
burning in the full turn of
embarrassment–would her parents even
pay? all cheeks reddened
in the muttering scritch stitch–but prised
from her furied mind an image
of FDR, patrician whose voice made bearable
the endless jags
of static and threat, whose overseeing eye–
bright to her as some great bird’s–would not,
she was somehow certain,
look down heedlessly
on a poor girl
with bleeding
bottom.

It was not
until the doctor spoke of luck
and the just-missing
of major organs that she noticed, above
the reversed collar twisted
like found
tourniquet, her mother’s
pallor, the seamed
hands running
up and down her layered arms
like creatures newly conscious of
a cage; not till then that she began to realize
how deep
the wound was.

************************************

So sorry the above is so long, but hopefully reads fast.  I am posting for MagPie Tales (in response to the picture above from the U.S. dollar posted by Tess Kincaid) and dVerse Poets Open LInk Night.  It is a true story – my mother survived the cut! (On her you know what!)  The Great Depression a terrible time for those like her family whose savings were lost in a foreclosed bank, that somehow still kept all its mortgages operational.   A nod here to Joy Anne Jones, Hedgewitch, who brought up FDR democrats the other day and got my mind running on this piece.  And of course a nod to my amazing mom who, at nearly 90, reads the New York Times every single day.