Milk from Chickens
The day my son declared with hammerhead certainty
that milk comes from chickens was the day
I yanked him out of the city
and drove west to farm and prairie land.
Like a nail pried from hard wood, he complained
from the backseat, missing electronic games and TV.
Near the South Dakota border, he saluted
a MacDonald’s as we flew by.
In my country, always summer,
it is never too late to find freedom,
to open a screen door to an entire day spent outside,
not missing anything.
I wanted my boy to take a turn lifting barb wire
to slip under and into open fields
keeping an eagle eye out for the crazy bull.
I wanted him to hold a bottle for a lamb
to feel the fierceness of animal hunger,
the suck of an animal mouth.
He needed to sleep out in nights encoded
with urgent messages of fireflies,
to see the bright planets in alignment overhead,
to stand on the graves of his grandparents,
dead so many years before he was born,
and to trace the names etched on granite pillows,
hard as the last sleep.
How else to plant in him the long root of prairie grass,
help him reach water in drought,
know who his family is?
© Margaret Hasse
Milk and Tides, Nodin Press, 2008
Changing Voice
Because he is only thirteen, his anger
flares, a gassed fire.
Because he is only thirteen, he snarls like a cur,
dislikes everything about his parents,
especially what they like,
books they read, jokes they tell.
Because his voice trips and falls,
as if on a loose rug, he breaks into tears.
Because the salt caves in the pits
of his arms are newly rank, he locks
himself in the bathroom for a hot
shower, steams paper from the wall.
Because he is small for his age,
he disparages his brother’s thighs
carried by those long bones:
You’re flabby, he screams, dangling
upside down like a bat from
the upper berth of their bunk bed.
Because he struggles to read
when others kids are quick
to spit words from their mouths,
he runs as if to surpass the wind
on a windy day, bedtime on a summer day,
chores and studying and rules every day.
Because he is only thirteen, sometimes
he still curls in his mother’s arms,
grubbing for stories he stars in:
how he could climb from his crib
to claim his own baby bottle,
how he’s graded A+ in music
for notes his trumpet hangs high
like the sound of wild birds
over the heads of other kids
who can’t believe he’s only thirteen.
© Margaret Hasse
Milk and Tides, Nodin Press, 2008
Poems from Milk and Tides by Margaret Hasse
