Drought

Under the dry soil their coffins crack and bend,
and the hands that once hung laundry or held the smokepole lie idle.

All those years they trudged from the well. The icebox sat forlornly in the summer field and maybe they longed to crawl in.

It's a dry season, we smile, drinking out of our water bottles and washing our hands beneath the tap.

They lugged it up from the creek and drank the brackish lukewarm sludge. In the summer kitchens, the cooks sweated over the eggs and the trifles. Flies swarmed thick around the pies on the window sill.

"What I wouldn't give for a breath of fresh air," sighed Louisa. The parlor was stuffy on the warmest days. Ruth climbed a tree and read Mark Twain until the distant rumble of thunder sent her running home.

Ruth buried Louisa and we buried Ruth. The drought buries us. Louisa gets no fresh air and Ruth's under a tree, not in it. They are the dust we stand on in a dry season.