My Mother’s Pears - Stanley Kunitz

[Larry Robinson]

My Mother’s Pears           
       

Plump, green-gold, Worcester’s pride,
            transported through autumn skies
                        in a box marked Handle With Care

sleep eighteen Bartlett pears,
            hand-picked and polished and packed
                        for deposit at my door,

each in its crinkled nest
            with a stub of stem attached
                        and a single bright leaf like a flag.

A smaller than usual crop,
            but still enough to share with me,
                        as always at harvest time.

Those strangers are my friends
            whose kindness blesses the house
                        my mother built at the edge of town

beyond the last trolley-stop
            when the century was young, and she
                        proposed, for her children’s sake,

to marry again, not knowing how soon
            the windows would grow dark
                        and the velvet drapes come down.

Rubble accumulates in the yard,
            workmen are hammering on the roof,
                        I am standing knee-deep in dirt

with a shovel in my hand.
            Mother has wrapped a kerchief round her head,
                        her glasses glint in the sun.

When my sisters appear on the scene,
            gangly and softly tittering,
                        she waves them back into the house

to fetch us pails of water,
            and they skip out of our sight
                        in their matching middy blouses.

I summon up all my strength
            to set the pear tree in the ground,
                        unwinding its burlap shroud.

It is taller than I. “Make room
            for the roots!” my mother cries,
                        “Dig the hole deeper.”

	- Stanley Kunitz
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