My mother doesn't play baseball: <br />She does the laundry—her eyes follow all of the heavens <br />The trails my father left across the <br />Rebar and sycophantic toads to go picking with <br />The rest of the knights in the orchards, <br />Having taken with him the last of our dromedaries, <br />But that is not why my mother weeps or doesn't <br />Wear any shoes: <br />The open extension cord has bitten her naked ankle <br />So many times it looks like a birth mark <br />And it doesn't care—the heavens send down tiny <br />Sparks that pirouette like little Chinese houses <br />For new years—and the iguanas roll and splay pot bellied <br />In the rock garden, nostrils flaring from <br />The perfumes of the night blooming jasmine: <br />Why she is desperate next to the blue Cadillac with electric <br />Doors is because she is waiting for it to rain <br />And for a young boy, maybe her son, to climb down <br />From the cross and lay like all of the weeping holidays— <br />Giving back to her what the thieves have stolen, <br />And what all of the kings have made her do.<br /><br />Robert Rorabeck<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/what-all-of-the-kings-have-made-her-do/
