“Ruderal” by Katie Beswick

October 10, 2024Posted by

Katie Beswick

RUDERAL

Freddie, at last! We’ll take our secret to the grave.
—last words of Frances Weller, my great-grandmother

It was a life spent, mostly
stooped over things.
The counter at the butcher’s shop
her parents owned,
all through both wars,
wrapping bacon in brown paper parcels
as bombs fell
and far away, men she loved
were shot at;
sometimes blood from the steaks
would stain her dresses.
An ironing board,
straight-backed
perfect perpendicular;
she’d smoke as she ironed,
barely touching the cigarette,
pressing
all her weight upon each garment,
erasing the possibility of a crease.
And babies’ bottoms—
because babies came
and wouldn’t stop,
two at a time,
and the men were locked away or fighting
and anyway, wiping was woman’s work.
Then knitting needles
with their insistent clacks.
It’s good to know that in the cracks
between duties
she sprouted secrets,
like tufts of grass grow on wasteland,
just when you’re sure there is nothing fertile left.
I think now of her hardness—
the thick, sun-worn skin
folded over the bones of her face,
her hands’ dry crevasses,
that mouth, set in its unsmiling line—
as bark to a tree,
covering what’s tender beneath.
 

—from Prompt Poem of the Month
September 2024

__________

Prompt: Find someone’s last words, and use that as an epigraph in a poem where “death” is not mentioned by name.

Note from the series editor, Katie Dozier: “All too often with epigraphic poems, the quote is more interesting than the poem itself. Here, the shocking last words of Frances Weller are immediately juxtaposed to the micro-memoir first line of the poem—and that brilliant contrast propels us through her life full of struggles. Instead of speculating as to her secret, Beswick explores empathy through the motion of her great-grandmother’s ever-moving hands during two world wars. Beswick’s tactile details are so well-crafted that we don’t just read her poem, we feel the heat of the iron and smell the smoke of her cigarette. The title both reveals the poem to be an extended metaphor for growth in the midst of adversity, and speaks more directly to the eventual fate of all of our secrets.”

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