by John Davis Jr.

Home from college in December, you curl longer fingers over
each chipped brick stacked behind the hurricane-slanted shed,
loading my rusty gray wheelbarrow like master masons
before your time. They raised schools and smokestacks,
troweled cement into wartime structures scented with history.

Today, you say I need a garden path to safely tread
among backyard beds loaded with marigolds.
You bend and plant each red rectangle in a swath of soil
long and black as a graduation robe at commencement.

Watching you, I press a twinge in my bad back, grow grateful
my degrees are done as you unload and secure in place
a curving trail across fresh earth, a way the old must follow.

~~~~~

John Davis Jr. is the author of The Places That Hold (Eastover Press, 2021), Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014), and three other poetry collections. His work has appeared previously in Nashville Review, The Common, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere over the last 25 years. He holds an MFA and teaches English and Creative Writing in the Tampa Bay region of Florida, his native state.