You resign yourself to the house this time of year—
biscuits from the oven overriding manure smells,
ever-tightening daylight between milkings.
At the kitchen sink, your silence passes to daughters.
Summer’s laugh tucked like a seed potato in the cellar
where it remains interred in the dark.
November has everything in its grip—
fretful animals driven for the last look at grass,
windows not yet cataracted with clotted flakes.
Inwardness becomes more than a passing through—
more than a long look at last geese going south,
more than leaf loss with maples holding in their sap.
This is your invisible force of faith telling the light,
the given sun, last leaves on the branch—you’re free to go.
You rock back and forth until spring is alongside you.
Nancy Huxtable Mohr is a retired teacher. She is a member of the Community of Writers and has taken Independent Poetry Study at Stanford University with Eavan Boland (2015). Her work may be found in her book, The Well (Butternut Press 2018), and in many journals, most recently at Loch Raven Review, The MacGuffin, Hyacinth Literary Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Blue Earth Review and many others. She was shortlisted for the 2022 UK Environmental Poetry Prize.