Work Song - Poem

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Hoke S. Glover III

For Mama

with a wrench you removed

a dripping faucet that kept time

through the night like a clock, you

swept the street and raked the leaves,

laid a coat of black asphalt across

the driveway, where the concrete was

cracking, you found solutions, pulled

a ladder out of the house and climbed

into the sky, where all the men

in the neighborhood saw you searching

for leaks and offered you their hands,

from the ground beneath your feet,

they could see a woman who would do

anything, demanded or seen, and offered

what you could not take, a singing that

is promise and beautiful, like the springs

where you would lay a treatment on the

greenest lawn for blocks around, while I

was chanting alphabets or calling numbers

out you were making dollars into umbrellas,

climbing a mountain, with two children

strapped to your back,

you cut shrubs down to size, put your hands

into the drain and pulled out the impossible

your many works of art, breathing and

standing, a child thrown into a bathtub

full of ice cubes, breaker of fevers and

woman with hands like shovels and

garden hoses, screwdrivers and putty knives

headed into nights with the same glossy eyes

men use for the day, you kept your promises

and kept them small: your children, your house

singing in the morning as I woke up

to the sound of a typewriter and records

spun on a turntable older than my understanding

that your doing and done are as close to perfect

as I will ever find in the world,

how beautiful you are

like those old and scratched records

just below your voice

Hoke S. Glover, III, holds the M.F.A. from the University of Maryland. His poems have appeared in The Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere.