Bringing Hope Home

They brought Hope home in crisp 
sunshine on a cloudless day to a 
backyard overlooking a forest.

Just a mother and daughter, a shovel,
a smallness wrapped in a ziplock bag,
 born four or five days before.

The lack of rain had hardened the earth
and the digging was unyielding work,  an 
hour of frustration before the ground yielded.

Finally, Hope was laid, the earth made smooth, 
solid.  Their arms still warm, they thought good 
thoughts, prayed for Hope and others passed on. 

The mother tried not to dream of her other 
children yet to be born— the daughter of her grandfather not dead a fall and winter.

                          ——————-

The morning they brought grandfather home 
was a rainy day before the first true freeze
and then snow.  A  bury quick day 

before the earth would turn cement in 
the drying cold, forming  slivers of crunchy 
cold taking hours and hours to dig through.

The earth besides the hole was still slushy 
and the clods of earth pushed easily into 
the grave, muddying them all over.  
                      
                           ———————-
The mother and child stood over the 
mass of tissue and blood and former
life, a remembrance clod in their hands.

The clod in the mother’s would nourish 
future Hopes- the one in the child’s would 
embody this Hope lost so soon,  be placed 

atop the mound in the forest under the old oak 
where grandfather rested close to home,
so he could see and feel and know 

the day they brought Hope home.