Brood

By June Sylvester Saraceno

Our breed was a brooding type,
menfolk in barns and garages, silent, 
thick fingers turning tools.
Those hands could snap a shoulder
back in place, or drown a litter
of unwanted pups. They did 
what had to be done, without a fuss.
Summer brought a bounty of small
skeletons, surfacing from shallow digs
in the piney woods.

Mothers, captive in their kitchens,
call children in when the evening
star brightens and bats begin to flit.
Call children in to supper, in for the night.
Then recall the lost ones, the nameless ones,
swallow hard, blink them back to shadow.
Turned gruff, these mothers stand 
what they can, what they must,
and command: don’t track in mud.

They knew the patch of earth allotted,
the garden toil, the final bed where
they would rest, marked as well
as times allowed. Wary folk,
dead set against raising false hope, 
they warned in word and deed
bloodlines map existence. 
We, their sullen children, 
even if we could, would not resist 
entirely, the stubborn pull
our dirt-lined palms predicted.

Even were we able to break 
Earth’s gravity, to rise like Venus,
bright in the gathering dark, put distance
between us, who would choose
to quench that old smoldering fire,
banked deep in the blood?
Who would choose to leave?

June Sylvester Saraceno is the author of the novella Feral, North Carolina, 1965, as well as three collections of poetry, including The Girl From Yesterday, released in January 2020 from Cherry Grove Publications. Brood was originally published by Big Muddy Journal.