Poem: Drought

We sit by the window of the nursing home
where her face can feel the sun.
Her eyes are cloudy with cataracts,
pale blue wells that caught
a lifetime of tears
and never let them go.
I want to ask her what it was like,
raising five boys on a panhandle farm.
I want to know if she loved my grandfather,
and was he good to her,
at the beginning or at the end.
I want to know if she named the
baby girl they lost, and did she blame
the doctor who came too late.
But all I ask is what she remembers
from the drought, those ten years
that broke the farm,
saw the bank take the land,
the family move into town.
What was hardest, she said,
what was really hardest
was to hear so much distant thunder
that never brought us rain.

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