Golden

for my parent’s fiftieth anniversary

In the old photographs, it is always autumn.

Colors fade to the sepia of remembered thought:

my mother in a flapper dress, my father

proud beside the Model A. They glow

in the light of dreams that I can never know.

What did they think of that autumn

they climbed into the photograph of bride & groom?

That love would conquer?—the Depression yield

more than its tart and scanty fruit?

In a season of scarceness, the bitter root

of her father’s death fresh within the house,

they strode from the church believing

in sunlight—the prairie ringing for them,

the October trees all aflame with praise.

Good farmers, they knew how to raise

the future, a steady hand on each day’s plow,

patience in the fallow fields, a table

big enough for all who’d need it, hope

in the seedlings, beauty’s grace, a faith

that is the opposite of winter’s death.

This autumn, I would take the color

of that triumph, the bright praise of trees.

the harvest secure in the heart’s high bins;

I would make of them a portrait fit to hold

through time: these trees, these lives, this gold.

“Golden” by Sonia Gernes, from What You Hear in the Dark. (c) University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.  (buy now)