The shoes in the photograph.. abandoned on the lawn near our house... reminded me of the tragedy in Arkansas this week when a flash flood swept more than twenty people away to their death... It happened not far from the place where I was born... The picture today and the tragedy all together reminded me of a time when I was no more than ten years old, and My Mother allowed two of my sisters and me to go out to pick poke sallet greens... not that any of it matters to anybody but to me, and perhaps to my sisters... but that's the way memories happen...

A lifetime ago a few miles downstream
from the place where women and children,
boys and girls and even a few men couldn’t
see the flood coming and they died... forever.
Miss Roberta took my sisters and me out
to pick poke sallet greens in springtime
at that place down by the Caddo river bridge
where the meadow runs along then comes up
slowly against dark woods... when I was ten
and a cruel war was devastating everything
somewhere like a senseless river roiling.
“Child, what you runnin’ on like that for!
Don’t you know it all going into the same pot!”