Southern Belle

by Diana Lynn Fesko

I think of my own mother and can't imagine
Blanche DuBois during those long years in New England
raising children in a place where ice formed on the windows
and the anguish of remembering her Carolinas.

To have come from a place of meadows and bare feet
hanging over stream pools and to know lilacs in August
on those hot afternoons when porch doors slammed.

Coming home was passing one red barn and then another
and falling under the soft smother of magnolia.
People end up in places they can never imagine
they offer their hearts to be taken captive from home.

Tennessee knew the scent of that dividing line,
magnolia is everything when the need to breathe
perfect air becomes greater than the need to breathe.