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Dust
on the piano
Dazzled
In the kitchen she is my ma,
in the barn and the fields she is my daddy's wife,
but in the parlor Ma is somthing different.
She isn't much to look at,
so long and skinny,
her teeth poor,
her dark hair always needing a wash, but
from the time I was four,
I remember being dazzled by her
whenever she played the piano.
Daddy bought it, an old Cramer,
his wedding gift to her.
She came to this house and found gaps in the walls,
a rusty bed, no running water,
and that piano,
gleaming in the corner.
Daddy gets soft eyes, standing behind her while she
plays.
I want someone to look that way at me.
On my fifth birthday,
Ma sat me down beside her
and started me to reading music,
started me to playing.
I'm not half so good as Ma.
She can pull Daddy into the parlor
even after the lat milking, when he's so beat
he barely knows his own name
and all he wants
is a mattress under his bones.
You've got to be something
to get his notice that time of the day,
but Ma can.
I'm not half so good with my crazy playing
as she is with her fine tunes and her
fancy fingerwork.
But I'm good enough for Arley, I guess.
March 1934
Karen Hesse
[poems from :Out of the dust.
The dark thoughts of Billie Jo during 'the Drought' in the thirties
of the United States.
Billie Jo Kelby is 14 years old and lives with her parents in
Oklahoma during 'The Dust Bowl Years of the Great Depression'
Despite the hard times and the ever present penetrating dust layers,
her life is not too bad.
She has a passion for playing fiercely on the piano, a talent
inherited from her mother.
After waiting for many years, her mother is expecting a baby;
maybe the son her father was hoping for.
Then disaster strikes and Billie Jo has to find her way out of
the dust.]
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