My grandmother in northeast Pennsylvania
on her tiny farm beside the river
fed her chickens every day at dawn.
I used to watch her scattering the grain
like John D. Rockefeller scattered dimes.
She was very poor and wanted nothing,
with the rising loaves in her fat kitchen.
Everyone who came there fed to fullness.
I was just a child but like a prince
I drank raw milk in chalices of glass
and wore a crown of many feathers
that she plucked before she cooked the goose.
On her porch, in sandals of bare skin,
she chatted with the sparrows in her eaves
while August sun spread gold doubloons
upon the purling Susquehanna River,
which of course she didn’t need to own.