Tags
creative writing, hats, migrants, mother's day, poem, poems, poetry
it all starts with a straw hat
and a wash basin –
the dawning of consciousness –
and the hot montana sun
shining on sugar beets where
a child plays at working
in the fields
summers pass and years pass and
the child is an old woman now
who wears other kinds of hats
not just a straw hat with a string
tied daintily under her chin
now she wears hats like the small-brimmed hat
her eldest daughter brought back as a gift
from thailand festooned with red blue and yellow
parrot feathers or the red plastic rain hat
with a wide brim she found for herself
at a second-hand store – a hat she claims
goes with everything
it is in the heat of burbank she lives now
and where around town she shows off her hats
they call me the hat lady she once told me
without the least bit of embarrassment
at kmart when they see her coming
they say here comes the hat lady
and she always smiles in return
for she doesn’t take it as a slight
the workers are her friends she says
and this is somewhere to go
when her apartment feels like a cage
here she can wander the aisles
browsing merchandise she could never
have had as a child
she lives in the present and the past
she remembers when she sat in a wash basin
as her mother and brothers picked sugar beets
in the fields and she remembers how sometimes
she would stoop alongside them playing
at pulling stalks with her small hands
she remembers the straw hat her mother
gave her to protect her from the sun
she remembers the rows and rows
of beets amid the aisles and aisles
that surround her now
it all comes full circle she tells me
it all comes round
and when i see a child’s look of delight
in my mother’s cloudy eyes – the amber
still visible within the cataract blue –
i know what she says is true