The Farmer's Wife

The Farmer's Wife

what was it like
to hold five babies in your belly,
and know them later as people

what was it like to wake with the chickens,
catching their eggs before they knew
they had laid them
everyday
without an alarm

just to wake
and know what has to be done
because no one else
will do it

what was it like

to fix a million meals
with colonial white bread,
butter and

jam jarred

on a wet summer night,
wiping
sweat and dead mosquitoes away, wondering
what it would be like

to sip champagne
in Paris.

what was it like to lose the man
you knew
as home
to cook his last meal
without realizing it was
his last

what was it like

to sway in a rocking chair that knew
the gentle curve of your hips, wood bending
for old age and apple pies consumed,
year after year

what was it like

dancing to the quiet music
of a broom
on hardwood floors,
swish, swish, swish

and dip

and the clock tick-tocking

and dip again
reminding the hours

there is still life
between the

little
and big hand

what was it like

to scrub every inch
of the farmhouse
over and over again for fifty years, memorizing,
like a poem or psalm
the cracks and ridges
that only you
knew

what was it like to walk the rows,
where the corn grows

like a green green wall
and loneliness has no sound

what was it like when sleep wouldn’t come
because it was just too quiet
to sleep

what was it like

on your last day...

you said, ‘I have been blessed to know all of you,’
what was it like not to know

that it was we who were blessed,
even though

we never would know
what it was like
to be you.

- by Froggymama