A Day Late...A Dollar Short

In honor of mother's day, albeit a Horrendous Halmark Holiday.
A poem you will never find in a card for it is way too gritty and real:

My Grandma Milkweed

Sprouted up in 1916, a girl
who lived through Prohibition,
the Great Depression, the wars.
First in France, then Germany, then deep jungles
of Southeast Asia followed by desert sands.
She could have predicted
the outcomes of all of them
after the first one, her crystal ball
was clear on that.

Tall, her fibrous limbs worked
the farm, picking and bundling
firm stalks of asparagus she sold to Naples
Fruit Stand down
on River Road. Her stem
was straight. Her leaves
were full. Flowers sprung up
in her hair, making her look exotic
not just overworked.

Her skin took on the hue of dirt
but her hair was always red, wrapped
up in kerchiefs. She went to work
welding fittings and never returned
to housewivery or the dirt
when the boys came home.

She sipped sangria
once, at the kitchen table
where she pickled canned baked.
She got a little heated
over the bastard she had married, the one
who drank his paychecks up and left her
to feed their seven children:
my mother, my aunts, my uncle.
But then she laughed
since she was the one who took up with him
anyway. Not like she didn’t know
what she was getting into.

Now, though, my Grandma Milkweed
doesn’t speak. She doesn’t know my face or name.
I tried to coax a word or two out of her
last time I saw her, eight years ago.
She was mostly gone then. She still lit up
when her dog brushed against her leg, begging
for a scratch.

I stopped going to visit her. I stopped
thinking of her

as anything more than history.
Her pod, split open
gave its seeds, adrift on their silken wings
to the wind. All that remains now
is hard, grey casing
and the silvery stem
where once we all attached.