Father knew six languages
and sold sewing machines in Odessa.
Before I was a schoolgirl,
I could read in three.
I remember the yellow hair
of my mother, that matched
the wands of wheat in picture books.
They buried her
among a few twisted shrags in the onions
where they had pulled up roots
and dug and dug;
poor mother was too big
for the box, so they had to bend
her knees to fit her in.
The fields were ice, and among the mills,
Polish women were picking mushrooms
off the truck in aproned coats
and blue babushkas.
Men covered my mother
in snow--letting it crack against
the pine lid in all sorts
of lovely, unpredictable ways,
like a foreign alphabet.
I am so old now
my mother seems like my own child.
I can lift her easily
as the Yiddish sky
boosting the birds and almond trees.
Thinking back, I'm glad
they dressed her in warm boots
borrowed from a sister.
White flakes will be falling
where she is traveling at last,
or else, it could be bare.
JUDITH HARRIS is an Assistant Professor of...
