New Poem: "The Precious Gold of Life"

The Precious Gold of Life

Nellie looks like a big chicken, a small head,

beak-like nose, and feed-bucket-carrying drooping

shoulders merging into a pear-shaped angled bottom

supported by wobbly knees, and she pecks here and

there on this and that with no rooster to blame because

he died of cancer. Great grandmother of twelve with

two children dead, also of cancer, tired, fatigued like

worn steel, she wobbles from room to room talking

to her noisy infertile egg-laying love bird, springless

French poodle, and to me. “Are you deaf?” she asks,

in a voice that strains her innocence as I feign not

to hear, and I walk the extra mile with a nod, a chuckle,

and a smile. She put a dime she had earned at a family

wedding into her mouth to keep it from her mother,

which she accidentally swallowed, and out it came

with her next number two for her mother to retrieve

because it was the hard times of the great depression;

and when her life story ended, I begged her for her

precious gold, and she replied, with a mournful

sigh, “Don’t hurt people.”