Two Old Women

— after a 1937 photo by Margaret Bourke-White

The two ancient, skeletal white women

wear hand-sewn dresses in cotton print, one a collar,

one not, one an apron, one not, they look out

across the dirt yard or back at their long lives

now nearly over. Hollowed temples & noses,

sinewy necks, fish-hook jaws, swollen blotched feet

stuffed into black broken-down lace-up shoes.

The chair legs hand hewn, the seats straw. Likely

these women raised so many children, raised & killed

farmyard fowl, cut wood, built fires, cooked & cooked

& cooked, boiled sheets & shirts & overalls & skirts,

carried water, first welcomed, then tended, then endured

obstreperous men. The plank-sided house they sit before

the house they’ve lived in most of their lives.

Their faces noble as Auschwitz prisoners, their bodies

sexless as fence posts, yet imagine if a child approached

how smiles would crinkle & crack their faces, how

brown-spotted knobbed fingers would pull the child

onto a bony lap, feed it a sweet, croon it a melody
older than they are.