From the breadbasket passed for years
around your table, your wife asked us each
to please, yes, take, a small brass bell
and to please ring them, please
as she led us to the bare branched copse
of oak sheltering the small hole your son
at dawn, hatchet split frozen ground to dig.
Keep ringing, as our twenty boot-heels
beat a mud path through fields of old snowmelt,
cornstalk stubble. Ring, please keeping
past a gnarled nest of wild grape vines
snaking through the rust pocked red tractor,
ring, please around the collapsed barn rubble,
cedar shakes, crumpled tin roof snarled
in a barbed bramble, keep ringing
as the river ran along beside us, your lab ahead
nosed marsh hens from the thicket ringing
ringing until your grandson
four, flung his bell, put his hands over
his ears screaming.
NANCY MITCHELL, a Pushcart Prize 2012 recipient, is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Near Surround (Four Way Books, 2002) and Grief Hut (Cervena Barva Press, 2009), and her poems have appeared in Solstice, Agni, Poetry Daily, Salt Hill Journal, and anthologized in Last Call from Sarabande Books. Make it Sound True, a teaching exercise using sound as a poetic device, is included in The Working Poet (Autumn House Press, 2009).
Mitchell is associate editor of special features for the online literary journal PLUME.
She has received an Artist in the Schools grant for Virginia and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia, in Auvillar, France. Mitchell teaches Art, Nature and Culture and Eco-Art in the Environmental Studies Department at Salisbury University, Maryland, in the Maryland Summer Center for the Arts, and has taught in the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with her husband, John Ebert, and her cats Larry Levis and Ron Howard.
