I. Thursday
The bucket in the laundry room
is stored up on the highest shelf
and labeled, in black marker, MOM—
with six kids lugging water out
to chickens, goats, and grazing sheep,
our buckets tend to disappear.
Tonight, my husband fills it up
with water, lukewarm like the baths
we used to draw for curling newborns
in our apartment’s kitchen sink.
With towel looped through leather belt
he reads the Gospel of St. John,
then kneels upon the kitchen floor,
ready to dunk our sockless feet
into my hoarded cleaning bucket.
As mother I am always first,
an honor saved for she who doesn’t
run barefoot through the dirt and grass.
Our youngest daughter squirms and laughs,
not understanding what’s at stake
in this odd ritual tonight.
And someone always tends to balk
at this abasement of their father,
pushing against it all, like Peter.
I sit with warm-wet feet and think
how little I deserve this man,
these children at the dinner table,
or the Suffering Savior offering pardon
of hidden sins I stash away
like junk upon the highest shelves.
II. Friday
Two hundred acres, just across the street,
is being prepped for building. Trees are felled
in furrowed wounds across the wide hay fields;
loud drills pierce wells into the red-clay earth.
A neighbor stops me as I’m running by,
tells me a black bear rushed her husband when
he came across it pawing through their trash.
My children spy the tangled piles of limbs,
the trunks that tilt askew, the stumps exposing
nude disks of heartwood to the graying sky,
and cry out for the fort they built last fall.
They found the carcass of a deer back there,
brought home a turtle shell, and rabbit skulls,
all precious relics stinking still of death.
I kneel to scour floors, and boil eggs,
then sit to rest a while on the porch,
and pray surrender prayers. Still, some black thing
is chasing me, some sorrow I can’t place—
middle age, or motherhood, or loss.
I watch a hawk land on the power line,
it rasps, and scans with me across the field.
III. Saturday
This year, I just refuse. No contemplation
of empty crosses or of pregnant caves,
of patriarchs plucked out of desolation
or how this pending resurrection saves.
I’ve slumped beside (or in) too many tombs
in these last months. I am a guard of graves,
teenage despair, stacked blankets in cold rooms,
and shaky echocardiogram waves.
Yet while I rue mortality, and brood
on those I’m bound to love, the sun bleeds out
beyond a gauze of clouds. The plunging rood
braces, preparing for tomorrow’s rout
of death, as vigil fires begin to spark,
defiant of the rain and falling dark.
IV. Sunday
At first, perhaps, you find that you are lost,
loose-wandering after breadcrumbs down a path,
or running from rough beasts throughout a wood,
and then the moment comes when you are found,
lingering in Lethe’s waterfalls as shame
slides off your skin and pools around your feet.
At first, perhaps, you find that you are blind,
your eyes stunned by the glare off sterile walls
or veiled in dark beneath your sewn-shut lids,
and then the moment comes when you can see,
as light caresses mossy trees, and fog
lifts like a resurrection from the cliff.
At first, perhaps, you think you’ve been snatched up,
a twisted plaything in an eagle’s claw,
careening up to kiss an open flame,
and then the moment comes when you are held,
close-cradled like an infant, or embraced
on a familiar threshold by a friend.
At first, perhaps, you find that you’re afraid
that everything you’ve taught has been for naught,
and children will forget you when they’re grown,
and then the moment comes when you believe,
while breaking bread, or kneeling in a garden,
with one bright-petaled rose cupped in your hands.
Carla Galdo is a graduate of the John Paul II Institute, a writer and editor for the Catholic women’s book group Well-Read Mom, and a student in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas-Houston. She lives with her husband, four sons and two daughters in Virginia.