Tempest

by Alice Woodrome

I've seen her face in yellow photographs
Beside a granite husband,
Lace and cameo at her throat,
Too young to look so drawn.

They say she bore ten children
Before the smallpox siege.
Five small bodies in the space of a month,
Bathed and dressed and mourned.

Her face appeared again on Hudson Street
Tending petunias in a whiskey barrel garden.
I watched her pause on crumbling steps
Her ashen hair lifting in the breeze.
I thought she moved too quickly

When he called her to the house.
Cigarette smoke and obscenities
Belching from an open window.

Today I saw her face again,
And searched my own gray eyes
Where dreams once lived as sweet
As watermelon at the drawstrings of summer.

The years have blown bone hard,
Young hearts were swept away.
Like willows in a hurricane, we bend.
We bend, and do not break.