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Here and There, Now and Then

By Carolyn Howard-Johnson

Here in Los Angeles geraniums
big as bushes, there, where memory
takes me, geraniums in pots
or window boxes, grandma's cellar,
the walls paved with Kerr bottles capped
with sticky discs, each filled with colors
grown, sliced, pressure-preserved
by her own hand, a barn out back
where grandfather slaughtered his lamb
and his year's take of venison into roasts,
the meat hooks now hang from eaves
empty, and not too far from Gram's chicken coop
a stump—where she unceremoniously
wrung the necks of old stewers for Sunday
supper which she doused with yellow-fatted
gravy and dumplings, also from her own hand.
If we did that still—the kill, slit, smell, gut-wrap
and freeze—rather than a nodded head,
memorized blessings or none
at all, we would fall each day
on our knees,
open our mouths in praise
for those bodies,
their lives
and what they give us.

And the geraniums? The colors more precious
for being smaller, fewer.