A lifetime ago
Northampton Mass.
I am 10 or 12, in the parking lot of the Big Y
brightly fluorescent even in the afternoon,
where my grandmother buys the freshly picked asparagus,
that she’ll steam and drench in butter
and serve on toast.
I could have gone in for teen starstruck magazines or 45s.
But it’s a grocery store, so I’m in the car waiting.
It is mid spring, green and manic.
The sky has the blue grayness of rain approaching,
the electricity palpable, tantalizingly unexpected.
We will all be safe. We will all live.
A few miles away tobacco fields,
and their rust-colored barns
and the mesh tents to keep the plants cool,
in the fertile crescent surrounding the Connecticut River.
The tents billow slightly in the quickening wind
I haven’t yet lost anything,
© Janet Belding
Janet Belding is a poet living on Cape Cod. The coastal environment is inspiring to her work. She enjoys gardening, nature, and her 2 dogs, and nature. She has been published in Cloudbank, Leon Literary Review, and The Macguffin.
The Loch Raven Review 