Editor Note:
A charming story of childhood horror:
On the border
If there is such a thing.
And there is
A little red head
Is sent to her graying grandmother’s parcel of ranch
South of the brown river.
The tiny grandmother
And dark uncle welcome her – quickly, hugs brief ….
She trembles, not from her mother’s dust-trailing
Departure in wind, dust and early summer sun.
The trembling continues,
Because her large eyes have seen the
Heavy green, sticky spiked and yellow-faced
Sunflowers – sunflowers lining the still dusty
Road, her mother’s VW gone – and paths and
Harvested fields ….
She stays close to the house:
The grandmother wringing clothes,
The uncle in a rocker, book and pen in hand,
Him reading and noting, while the grandmother
Hangs each wrung shirt and towel on a line
In wind, sun dust ….
She could go inside,
Listen to border radio ads and songs,
Or stay outside and help wring and hang clothes,
Or look over her uncle’s shoulder ….
But as with the past three summers,
She knows the looming sunflower stalks
Must be engaged
Their circular heads,
Black and brown-seeded eyes inside of iris of yellow-
They wait her entry
Long for her as they long for the sun
Disappeared in their pipe-like maze,
Never to rejoin in a month her mother,
Never to hear the grandmother spoon rice and beans,
Or the uncles Spanish sayings from academies of long ago ….
She walks up a path, not up the road, not along the fields,
A smaller stand of sunflowers, stilled for a moment,
The wind dead, the sun beating ….
Then, the wind rips the field, bends the bunch ….
She stops.
The, faces of giants
She sees, she feels the command.
Her mother is gone, almost to the river;
The grandmother has dumped the cool rinse water.
The uncle is dozing.
Another step into the eight, nine and ten-foot sunflowers ….
The prickles, the scratches, tear and she sobs ….
Then, a push on her shaking back,
“Go on, go in deeper!
I told you last year you
Must go in, and see that they do not want you,
Nieta, they do not want you, so as I did the
Other summer I am pushing you in,
And then step back to me, remember?”
She does, she moves with the push,
And when she turns around, her grandmother
Is there, arms open, ready to – now – hug her
For minutes, like last year and the two before ….
“Come with me to the house,
We’ll wake uncle.
You’re here with us, with us,”
And the summer begins,
The sunflower yellow rising to the sun’s yellow,
A cushion of color ….
