by Dottie Hutcherson
 
If you left and didn’t come
home for twenty years, I would
not keep your dinner warm.
 
I might leave a light on for five
or ten, but after fifteen
I’d be on the phone with your life

insurance agent to see if we
could use your policy to pay
for our son’s college tuition.

 
Daily, the manna reappears, exactly
enough, and we try to hold it tightly
like your papa, stockpiling firewood
so your family would always be warm.

Like you, standing at the sink washing
paint out of your new gray pants, she
pauses above her barren basin, pictures of her past
floating up like praises to a God she’s not sure
bends His ear to hear her anymore.

by Dottie Hutcherson
 
Sometimes it seems this wall isn’t enough to support
the weight of all she carries.  She comes, slouched over
in her sorrow, face wet with years of sadness.  He says, “It is
finished,” but she doesn’t seem so sure.  Hesitant, she looks up,
tiny flecks of hope, poking through her grief, like stars.