Crop Dusters
by Karen Luke Jackson
When my mother tossed covers
from her bed and cried for long dead relatives,
four bluebirds landed on a wire outside
her window and sang her back to childhood
when their kind flocked clay-streaked fields,
nested in fence posts
her father set in the ground, puffed
their rust-red breasts and flashed
their icy wings as she hung suet
on cedars that flanked the family’s cabin.
I never see bluebirds anymore, she’d said
not linking their loss to crop dusters
until she, too, began to die.
She kept a round music box
with bluebirds on top—its windup long
broken—in a curio shelf beside her bed.
Reminds me of home, she whispered
while she still had breath. After her death,
after I changed the sheets and smoothed
the spread, those birds began to spin and sing.
Karen Luke Jackson (she/her) draws upon oral history, contemplative practices, and nature for inspiration. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Broad River Review (Ron Rash Poetry Award), Ruminate, Channel Magazine, One, The Blue Mountain Review, and Atlanta Review. Karen has two collections of poetry, a chapbook GRIT which chronicles her sister’s ventures as an award-winning clown and The View Ever Changing, which explores the power of place and family ties. Karen grew up in South Georgia and now lives in a cottage on a goat pasture in Flat Rock, North Carolina. There she writes and companions people on their spiritual journeys.
