Just After Dawn
I woke to the murmur of my words.
Leaning against the headboard
I yielded to the words that took me back
to my mother's slow death, how I finally stopped wishing
I had a sister to take her off my hands,
how we worked through that long illness to embrace
and she called me Ruvn. Ruvn.
Then I remembered a pushcart
and that day in the wintry '30's
when she chatted with a bearded man in Yiddish
about the old country.
She reached into his pile
of hats and gloves,
pulled out a leathery cap,
fixed it squarely on my head,
looked at me and asked,
"Is it too tight
when you button the flaps?"
They settled on a price.
He put his rough hand on my head
and I flinched under his blessing.