Dirty Delight

Donning Earth's make-up my face gleamed with happiness

A true happiness I'd never felt until I toiled her garden of barren hue

The sweet potatoes heavy in my basket gave heft to my gait

A small price to have this moment in the soil where I grew

It was in that instance that my gaze fell upon her nakedness

Free of time and space and one with the ground below

I saw my Grumma, raw and bare, clutching the harvest of her labor

I really saw her for the first time, beautiful, freckled, bronzed glow

Hot yellow sun of the southern Summer causing her to perspire

She wiped her brow with the pastel flowered gardening glove

Streaking her face with a lovely red clay Maybelline couldn't replicate

In that very moment she out-shined the cloudless, azure sky above

The garden made us equal, not elder and grand-daughter, just women

Our faces a sun-kissed pink smeared with that beautiful dirty brown

Everyone tilled, everyone dug, everyone pulled those green weedy intruders

Everyone ached, everyone healed, everyone filled their souls with renown

Another Summer had passed and the humid southern Autumn was about

Grumma's crystal blue eyes seemed more weary than the season before

I could still see her grays dancing in the hot orange sun of Summer

And those blueberry eyes reflecting umber Harvest Moons of days of yore

All the colors of the rainbow waltzed about her ethereal being

Yet none had shone so bright and carried as much grace to tease and flirt

Lowly, humble dirt and clay blending rouge and sepia forming glorious awe

Yet none could showcase the beauty of woman like that plain brown dirt