Meghan

The grass that April seemed stunned,
as if winter had kicked it out of the house.

That was the year of the fiery crash
and the bullshit sermon.

Daisies came up in the graveyard,
and the spring sun went down easier than it rose.

You were Meghan of the tractor pasture,
my baby of the barbed wire ditch.

You showed me, all those times under a sickle moon,
how a Scorpio's kiss can make the earth move.

Mama said it was the mines settling,
but all I believed in, that April, was the gospel of your arms.

Summer came, and the cicadas sang, then died.
Later, we knocked pecans down from the trees,

gathering them in our jean jackets spread on the ground to be forgotten
as we got drunk on illegal beer and each other's skin.

April is always a rainy, uncertain month,
and summer, here, can put a good woman in the madhouse.

Anyway, it's only March, and colder than a banker's smile,
but I woke up thinking of you, Meghan, so I called in queer and wrote you this poem.
________ 

image: Emmylou Harris