Folding Clothes

I Stop Writing the Poem

to fold the clothes.  No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together.  Nothing can stop
our tenderness.  I'll get back
to the poem.  I'll get back to being
a woman.  But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

-- Tess Gallagher (read in Good Poems, ed. Garrison Keillor)

The gift of time, of keeping house with my children beside me.

And a green leaf heart - from Genevieve, "the first gift for your Mother's Day, Mom."