Oranges

This poem was written fifteen years after my father’s death. He was a good reader, and remembered what he read, but as an adult he wasn’t a reader of many books; certainly not of poems. Like so many of his generation, he read the daily newspaper from front to back. And like my mother, he encouraged his three children to read, and expected us to do well in school, which, by and large, we did. Being a farmer, he was by nature and necessity up early every day. Dawn was for him a sacred time, a time when everything was most right in the world. He worked tremendously hard, with never a complaint; that was his way. He was a true guardian of his family. He loved having friends and relatives around. “He Took the Morning in His Hands” is not the only poem in which I have remembered him in the act of peeling an orange. We had three orange trees behind our house. He peeled a great many in his time, sometimes eating as many as eight of them in a day, four in the morning, four in the afternoon.

[ 2011 ]