Letter 10
by Judith Minty
Even though the plants
are only a foot tall,
you, our sixteen-year-old baby, dream them ripe
with fruit, the tomatoes scarlet in their fullness.
And you come flushed from sleep to tell this wealth,
how each night you root through rich soil
to reap the harvest of your first garden.
Nineteen years ago we dreamed your sister,
the child not of our own mating, although we tried,
who came to us, all rosy, at seven weeks
and slept cribbed in the room below ours.
Three times in those first days
we woke at night, eyes blind like moles
against the lamplight, and groped the sheets,
palms flailing in the empty air between us.
We meant to find her when she cried, to make
her in that space of barren bed
our child, the fruit of love and holding,
before we opened to each other and the space
between us suddenly remembered empty, before we fled
the stairs and soothed the dream
and counted soil for what it was
and took the harvest and felt lucky.
Judith Minty lives in Muskegon, Michigan. Her first book, Lake Songs and Other Fears , won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1973. This poem, which first appeared in Letters to my Daughters from Mayapple Press, was reissued in Dancing the Fault (University of Central Florida Press/Orlando, 1991).
Updated 4/18/07
Judith Minty (Michigan)
Letters
to My Daughters
Paper, saddlestitched, 24 pp
$5 plus s&h
1981, ISBN 0-932412-04-3
This collection of poems by a leading Michigan poet explores, through the daily life of women, the relationship between a poet/mother and her two daughters.
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