mother & daughter - archive picture

spaces
(for Elizabeth)

She prefers
the safe walls of homes
to wide-open spaces these days,
her hands now fashioning
quiet patterns of domesticity.

Having forsaken
her plains' creative endlessness
for many new voices' demands
brings a silent smile to her face --
She finds nothing lost,
as they need her,
and the desert 
stays well in its loneliness.

She paints still-life now
and not landscapes,
in colors she hadn't used until then;
pale blues and disciplined browns
left for playful green
and the laughter of yellow.
And to the noisy bouncing of balls
and passed plates,
her sky now waits, patient.