Providence Rhode Island, 1962

The widow had a woodpile beyond the garage in the rear

assembled from nearby buildings demolished for the highway

by loading pieces of wood on a child's rusted red wagon.

She had crossed the churning ocean from her father's farm

as a young woman, trading a dirt-floored home shaded by trees

for a three-story wood tenement beside the railroad tracks.

She worked hard, initially for one dollar a day sorting rags.

She met and married a fellow emigrant. She bore and raised children,

losing only one to the Spanish flu. She helped the newest greeners.

She fed people as she could during the Great Depression years.

One who she had helped had left a mark flagging her place

to the many homeless passing by along the train tracks.

Later, her living children now grown, her husband long dead,

she burned coal and wood in a cast iron kitchen stove

and fed her grandchildren soup, sausage and apple pancakes.

At times at night, she remembered dancing as a girl one Sunday

with her brothers and sisters and neighbors near a full hay wagon

in a cleared field ringed by birches and pines.