A Blessing For Baby Love Poem by Leo Briones

She is the girl with hair two shades redder than a pecan pie. She is the girl with whom
I want to yarn a twisting reverie of a lazy southern moon, slung flush on the horizon like a long and rising sun.

It is late summer and the air is still sticky as an old swamp ghost. Frogs and crickets
keen like panthers into the night. Behind four Doric pillars and a wrap around porch, you
can hear the madness in the slow, southern, feminine of a mother’s drawl,

“You ripped you dress, your shoes have mud, watch your manners sugar girl.”

Hiding on the other side of heavy oak door— little Miss Georgia nineteen-thirty four, slender and pretty as a meadow in her light peach summer dress.

Still this beauty queen screeches like a raccoon caught dead eye as her ivory-toothed comb pulls and tugs at baby love’s blaze of curls,

“Why does he love you more? Why does he love you more? ”

And I want to tell that little girl with a heart that roars like a river and tomboy legs that run through the red clay mud—that I know behind those pale eyes

there is a sadness that has no sound and wafts on the summer breeze like a slow death.
I want to tell that little girl who, all grown now, but still chews a dandelion’s stem—

I want to tell her and her tender smile, “Oh darling girl, I too have heard the unheard sound and floated on the sticky air of death. And through it all I’ve tugged the roots beneath the ground only to see them hang before me with their authenticity of sand
and soil

to reveal,

“Why he loved you more than her. Why he loved you so much more than her.”