WINTER PEARS . . . . . . . watercolour Poem: My Mother's Pears

My Mother's Pears

By Stanley Kunitz

1905-2006

Worcester, Massachusetts

Plump, green-gold, Worcester's pride,

transported through autumn skies

in a box marked HANDLE WITH CARE

sleep eighteen Bartlett pears,

hand-picked and polished and packed

for deposit at my door,

each in its crinkled nest

with a stub of stem attached

and a single bright leaf like a flag.

A smaller than usual crop,

but still enough to share with me,

as always at harvest time.

These strangers are my friends

whose kindness blesses the house

my mother built at the edge of town

beyond the last trolley-stop

when the century was young, and she

proposed, for her children's sake,

to marry again, not knowing how soon

the windows would grow dark

and the velvet drapes come down.

Rubble accumulates in the yard,

workmen are hammering on the roof,

I am standing knee-deep in dirt

with a shovel in my hand.

Mother has wrapped a kerchief round her head,

her glasses glint in the sun.

When my sisters appear on the scene,

gangly and softly tittering,

she waves them back into the house

to fetch us pails of water,

and they slip out of our sight

in their matching middy blouses.

I summon up all my strength

to set the pear tree in the ground,

unwinding its burlap shroud.

It is taller than I.  "Make room

for the roots!" my mother cries,

"Dig the hole deeper."

WHIMSICAL VERSION