Poem: Drought

A version of this story ran in the January / February 2024 issue.

We sit by the window of the nursing home

where her face can feel the sun.

Her eyes are cloudy with cataracts,

pale blue wells that caught

a lifetime of tears

and never let them go.

I want to ask her what it was like,

raising five boys on a panhandle farm.

I want to know if she loved my grandfather,

and was he good to her,

at the beginning or at the end.

I want to know if she named the

baby girl they lost, and did she blame

the doctor who came too late.

But all I ask is what she remembers

from the drought, those ten years

that broke the farm,

saw the bank take the land,

the family move into town.

What was hardest, she said,

what was really hardest

was to hear so much distant thunder

that never brought us rain.

To submit a poem, please send an email, with the poem as an attachment, to [email protected]. We are looking for previously unpublished works of no more than 30 lines, by Texas poets who have not been published by the Observer in the last two years. Pay is $100 on publication. Poems will be chosen by our guest editors.