THREE SCORE AND TEN
Three score and ten is the age of my mother,
The light of my childhood, the wife of my father,
The mild quiet strength at the heart of a family,
My mother is seventy, three score and ten.
* *
Thoughts of things treasured all flicker in memory
Clothes pins laid out while my mother irons clothes
And shows me how counting to twenty is fun
And then laughs as I count to a hundred and one.
She shows me the alphabet so I can read
She makes the short pants for my first day in school
She weeps over barbed wire that just missed my eye
And I’m sorry a cut made my dear mother cry.
Ten thousand responses she makes to my bed
When I’m tonsil-less, kitty-mew box in my hand
She shrieks is dismay over two hundred bugs
That I’ve brought in a tin can and dumped on her rug.
A treasure in photo, my father so handsome
In springtime white clothes with a gleam in his eye
And my young mother proudly stands holding the arm
Of her man, who dreams of yet owning a farm.
Remember a coal stove with round silver skirts
That puffs at my mother and scares her to death
Remember her struggle to sweep out the sand
A great sandstorm has visited over the land.
Recall her farewell to ten years on the prairie
Her joy in the new home surrounded by mud
But the land is Kentucky, her home in the Southland
Methinks she would rather scrape mud than sweep sand.
Recall all the new clothes each school year she bought me
No kid in the school more in style clad than me
Remember her patience through all my dread teen years
Remember her good meals, her helping, her tears.
Recall the steadfast years of prayers and concern
Of an untimely stroke as she cares for my father
Of a life yet as full as commitment permits
For her unflagging courage and strength never quits.
I sing of my mother, the alto in choir
The busy homemaker, the teacher of right
For all that she taught me is deep in my spirit
My good Christian mother’s love still makes me whole.
* *
Three score and ten is the age of my mother,
The light of my childhood, the wife of my father,
The mild quiet strength at the heart of a family,
My mother is seventy, three score and ten.
