Mantis 19 (Spring 2021)
"A figure in which secret things confide"
Nancy Huxtable Mohr
My poem is an homage to Eavan and her incalculable influence on my life and my poetry. She continually mentored me as a poet and encouraged me to write the history of my 200-year-old family farm, especially the lives of the women. My husband and I felt so lucky to have her great friendship through our 20-year involvement with the Mohr Visiting Poet Program in Stanford’s Creative Writing Department.
The Maple Woods
Small things make the past
from Eavan Boland’s poem, “The Old City”
Someone is out there near the sap house
walking back from the Sugar Bush.
Sunlight wraps its reaching and rounding over the East Meadow.
April’s air beckons life to new leaf.
(these were woods and meadows before they had names)
Your great grandmother enters by the mud room,
hangs her ruffled apron on the kitchen shelf,
tin bucket full of fresh sap.
Entangle your arms with hers,
haul the cast iron pot together to the fire,
watch the liquid boil, thick and dark.
(make this her story, not yours)
Now, say I did what I could.
Taste hot syrup on johnny cakes.
Pull back your chair, recall
my tongue’s taste of maple,
my greening woods.
NANCY HUXTABLE MOHR grew up on a dairy farm in Upstate New York which has been in her family for over 200 years and now lives in Northern California. She is a graduate of Cornell University, has a San Francisco State Teacher’s Credential and has published in many journals such as Mangrove, ZYZZYVA, Avocet, Concho Review and has one book of poems, The Well. She is a member of the Community of Writers and California Poets in the School and has taught in numerous public and private schools and the Redwood City Women’s Jail.