Who Will Note

Earlier this summer I traveled back to my hometown in South Dakota. My father came from a farm family of twelve siblings, and many a summer as a child I spent time on that farm with my Aunt and Uncles. None of the three married and all remained to work the land. Theirs was not an easy life but I always eagerly looked forward to spending time in the country with them. The days there were filled with freedom to roam and bounded by their love.



Who Will Note


two brothers and a sister
who farmed the 20th century in eastern Dakota?
Their dry-land crops and skinny livestock?
The Dust Bowl dirt that sifted over
their own childhoods?
The grasshoppers that once ate skivvies
and everything else off laundry lines?
The hollyhocks climbing a rickety trellis,
the tire swing in the side yard?
The tornado that repositioned their barn?
The rosaries prayed during fierce storms
on the midnight Plains?
The fat years with bumper yields of corn?
The annual table full of threshers
downing chicken and gravy, pies and coffee?
The small town bartending job worked weekends
when summer hail shredded the fields?
The pint of whiskey stashed in a bureau drawer?
The Sunday dinners crowded with siblings
and their offspring now moved to the city?

No prodigy of their own
nor flashy heroic deeds claim them.
Only their photos, fading in shoeboxes
of scattered nieces and nephews,
and three simple tombstones, side-by-side,
starting to list in a country graveyard
mark their presence on the prairie.



Marilyn Aschoff Mellor