My Mother's Middle Name Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Purple is the throat of the pagan flowers
Up the Welsh slopes and their darker sisters- where
It rains unevenly for the weeks, and keeps the tourists
Inside- and the kings there wear antlers,
And their baseball diamonds are ten feet underground,
And when the ants crawl up too they are all of
Different sizes and made of half hewn stones,
But their sisters are beautiful, tossing their hair
As they come out of the underground trains-
And the foxes that they have there live in the hollows
Of trees and eat figs and smoke pipes:
And when they see her, they have this glint in their eye,
And they are not even scared of the hunt until she
Comes to them and bends down with her hand gesturing.
Why, they are so quiet then that anyone can here the
Toads ululating all the way from the carports and
Wells of the hotel rooms stockpiled with tourists-
And their legends are mute, and their horses are tamed
In fields at the end of bruised cul-de-sacs while
The soft mountains rise up in a chorus that happens to
Sing of deer with antlers soft enough to fall
Asleep under- and the sleepers remain there,
Weeping, as the world that they lay under wakes up
And moves on, with fireworks as quiet as maybe
Pickpocketed across the banks of a river named after
My mother’s middle name.