heather hamilton / poem

Atavist Boomer’s Bedtime Ghazal 

On the last day, Ma Bell will bring us home to Texas. 

Meet us at the bluffs, and lead us east and west and south into Texas.

She will ride on a silver horse—

silver as mesquite, with ankles as solid and sturdy as Texas.

Ma Bell will re-callous our outstretched hands 

and call us by our own names in the punch-card dawn of Texas.

She will spoon shop dust back in our lungs, sprinkle it in our hair, 

and shake it loose like summer pollen over Texas.

Ma Bell will dress the outlaws all in Halloween black, 

and we will know them instantly in the tin-star light of Texas.

She will re-lattice the fruit pies of our childhood memory 

and sit them out to cool on the white-washed sill of Texas.

She will swaddle us, red-cheeked bundles of postwar promise, 

in the receiving-blanket warmth of Texas,

rock us back and forth, forth and back, until we drift off

as tumbleweed, bouncing weightless over Texas.

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Heather Hamilton is the author of Here is a Clearing, which was published by the Poetry Society of America. Heather has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the T.S. Eliot Foundation, and recent poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, Smartish Pace, Poetry Northwest, and the Cincinnati Review, among other journals.