Some afternoons are like this—
the stupor of Florida light
leaning between a vulture’s black wings
while he picks apart a garden snake
on the road outside our house.
On the road outside our house,
an ICE agent surveys our block like a bird
whose hovering means death
is nearby. Nothing really changes. Mom still doesn’t believe
in the dishwasher, thinks the only way
a plate can get clean is if you scrub it
by pressing the whole weight of your body
against the grime that grips the glass
until it glimmers white as a country
devoid of people like us. We tell Mom to stay in and rest
but she refuses. Her hands can’t stay still,
which is why she planted the small garden
that she tends to every morning.
It is not about the vegetables. The dirt is dry and futile
and the bed floods every June, leaving her no choice
but to start over again. First seed then dirt then rain then light.
Then, finally, a small sprig that keeps her
hopeful, in prayer of new blooms. Today, when she walks out
to the garden in her muumuu, hair knotted
and unkempt, and submits her brown knees
to brown dirt under the undying heat
like a saint at the foot of an altar,
I watch the man in the truck watch her
the way a predator watches a small thing
it can trick, and feel like the young girl I was
once, kneeling beside her in a pew, asking God
to make some small miracle of our life.
Imagine a blessing like that now: Mom’s garden flush
with peppers, carrots, little crowns
of broccoli sprouting. The snake uncrushed.
The small root she unknots from the earth
the only thing plucked from this home.
O God, if you do nothing else, cover me
in just a crumb of the courage
Mom maintains standing in her yard
in the beautiful conflagration of this country:
one brown hand holding a small gift the soil has given,
the other waving at the officer as if to say,
You are welcome. Come inside and eat.