NaPoWriMo #4

A Stranger Walks Up To A Mother Playing In the Park

Hey, do you mind if I play in the mud?
And who is she to deny him,
original mother of mud players, pie makers
trackers of wet earth across her floor.
It has been her job from the dawn of time
to allow mud.
To cover the hut in mud,
cover the wounds with mud,
drag herself up out of the mud.
It is mud she spends her days with,
mud she cleans nightly from their shoes
from their carpets,
washes in wide arcing circles
before sending it cleaned and gleaming
down her drain.
Even as she feeds her children
she repeats the old adage under her earthen breath,
One peck of dirt per child, per childhood.
One peck, one peck, one peck.
We’re all good.
We’ve got the pyramid covered.
Even as she tosses the clean stitched ball to her son
and he drops it in a puddle,
slides through an endless brown pond
to slick the mucky ball back at her.
Even in that dirty instant she knows
she will not drag her children through
the mud back to their car.
She is not afraid of this man
spreading his blanket next to a puddle,
preparing, perhaps, for a picnic
were it not for the mud
he has settled next to,
were it not for the mud
he is wringing through his hands--
a potter working his clay.
It is the stuff of life.
We are born from the earth.
We go back to the earth.
Stranger! Stranger!
The strange man digging his strange
hands into the mud,
letting wet mud fall from hand to hand
from hand to hand,
a brown, cloudy metronome.
Who among us has not wanted permission
to play in the mud?
Who would dare deny it?

********************


I was going to post a poem I wrote last week, not in April. Then I went on a date with my husband. He told me a story. I came home, wrote this poem. Thanks, Dude!