Audio: Read by the author.

 

Thinking of how much my father loved flowering plants
And how much my mother still does.

And of how unfathomably hard it must have been
To clothe and feed ten children

With the most meagre of salaries for tending to citrus orchards—
For shovelling and irrigating and shovelling again.

How he groaned when I removed his work boots
At day’s end, an exhaustion deeper than any well.

Mom says his boss was a jerk, nothing ever good enough.
On top of everything, that empathy of her for him

Who’d never listened to her pleas because the priest said
All the children God will allow, the priest

Who never saw her afternoons slumped by the kitchen table,
A blank stare into somewhere

My voice could never reach.
Nothing to do but walk away. I swear

This is not about the unwanted child,
Or what a therapist called embodiment of the violation,

But about the strength and will to cradle the plants
Outside—the pruning, the watering, the sheltering

In found tarps and twine against the coldest nights.
To lean into the day’s hard edge,

And still find that reserve of tenderness
For the bougainvillea, the hibiscus, the blue morning.