I know why you were buried here, I want
to tell them. Too many rules, too many quarrels
over dancing and uncovered heads. When
coffins were plucked from the earth like
red beets in the middle of the night, away
from the mother church, you made a pact
to rest together here.

There is so much more I want to know
about my family—I want to live
their definitions of love.
Grandma: tell me of the unborn baby
lost while picking apples. Grandpa: tell me
how you felt when your son denied your God,
when the cancer bit into you, when you look out
on your father’s father’s fields
and know you, too, will leave them.
I want to know why, when gathered in
dining rooms, we talk about weather, avoiding
conflict always, and asking, instead,
for second helpings.

Sometimes, our quiet
is like a warm quilt in stifling heat—
I want to fling it from my legs and
onto the floor, dancing in cool, new morning!
I want to unlatch all the windows, lean
far into the summer, and
let the music out.

—Rebecca Rossiter, Kidron, Ohio, is working toward a Master’s degree in poetry at Ohio University, teaches writing to college freshmen, and is a published composer and folksinger. She served with Mennonite Voluntary Service in Seattle, Washington, during 2004-05 in hopes of encouraging young Americans to serve their country without investing in war. Her most recent work often focuses on her Anabaptist roots, paired with a growing concern that active pacifism and simple living are evaporating from many Mennonite churches. She is currently working on a book of poems exploring her parents’ humanitarian work in Monrovia, Liberia.

Can You Remember the Smell of Alfalfa on Your Hands?
The fields still take my breath away.
It isn’t like I forget them in the city
or even discover something better
in cur-le-cuing sidewalks
or the eager pull of skylines at night. I don’t
notice them at first, as I’m bringing in suitcases or
petting the dog. It is when

I’m on my way to the bulk food store,
when the purples and blues of sudden
winter drip down past the lull of the hills,
that my body and mind are still, the car
racing towards shelves of dried fruits,
honey-roasted nuts, wheels of pale cheese.

I am the only car on gravel roads, but I’m
speeding because I am used
to motion; I am speeding to beat a rush
that does not exist in a place where cows
outnumber people, and stars
speak at night. Stepping out from behind
the wheel, into the smell of living acres,
there is nothing to separate me
from pastures and skies holding snow, from
the color that spills like paintbrush water
behind the fields that raised me.
—Rebecca Rossiter

Psalm to a Simple Supper
We came from our comfort to serve you
ham and canned green beans, cornbread and
black coffee. We came
in our used cars, passing you
on wide sidewalks. You made your way against
winter gusts and the steady tug of pride
to the old church basement where we’d look at you
through different windows, from distance
guarded.

We sing for you in the sanctuary, some
old familiar hymns, have
time to study the unwashed face, the aged
curve of your spine, decades of guilt burrowed
in your forehead, stories lodged unforgiving
between shoulder blades.

I am a good person, I tell myself as my
heart skips a beat when, after your
belly is full and fingers are once again
pink, you move to embrace me
much like a happy grandfather would. You are
a boy of seventeen as you
squeeze my cheek to yours. You are not
judging me while I am
taking in your rough, dirty stubble,
your mismatched wardrobe, the way your arms
remind me of a clinging scarecrow. You are calling me
Sweetheart, gently patting my hair, and I never
ask your name.

Somehow you know that
we came from our comfort to
give and go back quickly
into our worlds where smiles are not
toothless, where suppers are seldom simple.
Somehow you know
and forgive.
—Rebecca Rossiter