Читать книгу Splitting an Order - Ted Kooser - Страница 10

110th Birthday

Helen Stetter

Born into an age of horse-drawn wagons

that knocked and rocked over rutted mud

in the hot wake of straw, manure and flies,

today she glides to her birthday party

in a chair with sparkling carriage wheels,

along a lane of smooth gray carpeting

that doesn’t jar one petal of the pink corsage

pinned to her breast. Her hair is white

and light as milkweed down, and her chin

thrusts forward into the steady breezes

out of the next year, and the next and next.

Her eyelids, thin as old lace curtains,

are drawn over dreams, and her fingers

move only a little, touching what happens

next, no more than a breath away. Her feet,

in fuchsia bedroom slippers, ride inches above

the world’s hard surface, up where she belongs,

safe from the news, and now and then, as if

with secret pleasure, she bunches her toes

the way a girl would, barefoot in sand

along the Niobrara, just a century ago.