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Susana Gonzales
Mother’s Earth
my hands are as soft as my mother’s were
but they don’t hold her scars
scratched by barbs of the cotton bolls she twisted
and pulled at in the farm fields under a dead
Delano sun at day’s end she earned 87 cents
bought a hot dog from a vendor parked across the road
where she sat eating it in the dirt
the lifeline on my mother’s palm was as long
as the row after row of grapes she picked and packed
stacked and trayed these fruits for clean bright tables
far from the dust of the camp she sat and slept in
the land she worked and lived in
field she gave her back to
brown soil on my mother’s hands
this dirt of mother’s earth