by Courtney Siebring
UPROOTED
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot.” —Ecclesiastes 3:1-2
There they stood all these years
in the corner of my mind marked “romanticized notions,”
under a faded sepia filter, crackling with texture and torn edges.
My great-grandparents.
Clad in their denim overalls and cotton dress,
side by side in a field,
bent at the waist,
as crooked and strong as the Ozark poplar
the cattle collected under in the heat of the workday—
picking—
cotton, potatoes, blackberries,
their words,
as careful and clean as their white shirts on Sunday morning.
I always envisioned their darkly tanned feet
extending into the earth—
past the rocks and silt loam
(or was it sand and clay?),
toes like roots making them one with the land.
But, they were also stretched out in that corner of my mind
as tall and sincere as the palms
lining Florida boulevards, the subject of postcards—
reaching—
for oranges, grapefruits, mandarins,
their dreams,
tiny suns of sweetness
as bright as the future they spoke of while lying on their marriage bed
at the end of the workday.
Now these two images
clash in my mind.
How could these grounded figures
be like both the poplar and the palm?
I imagine they were also like the cotton pried from its boll
or the orange snatched from its stem.
How could they be rooted while the scenery so often changed?
From the future I beg them to teach me.
Migrant farmers to military wife,
would you press into the soil of my soul
what Ecclesiastes’ preacher
told the ancients?
There is a time for every purpose under heaven.
A time to plant and a time to uproot.
Yes, God has set eternity into every human heart,
regardless of the generation,
regardless of the landscape.
I inherited my great-grandmother’s humor
and her longing for home
as she did from Eve.
There truly is nothing new under the sun.
The Ozark sun,
the Florida sun,
the sun that shines above all the cities in which I’ve ever lived.
The sun that will set on this life,
uprooting me finally and transplanting my body
deep beneath the earth,
even as my spirit will rise to find a field or a grove
set along streets paved with gold
to dig its roots down deep and forever.
There truly is nothing new under the sun.
Until that time the sun is needed no more,
when we’re all rooted in the Creator’s glory.
MUMS
Some days
it’s disorienting
how little the world
resembles the one of my childhood.
Then things like fall mums
outside of the grocer,
stacked and arranged
like the autumn jewels they are—
amethyst, ruby, and topaz—
root me to reality.
There are seasons.
And they will come
without permission
as surely
as the passing of this generation
into the next.
The seeds from which
these grocery store mums
have bloomed
know this cycle well.
They came from the mums
I dragged the palm of my left hand across
as I walked outside of the Little Rock Kroger
with my mother,
explaining to her
how they felt as lovely as they looked.
Those came from the mums
that my mother touched
the tip of her nose to
outside of the Winn-Dixie in Tampa
before her walk home with my grandmother,
carrying the brown paper bags
and the mums' colors in her mind.
And the seeds of those mums came
from ones outside of the Piggly Wiggly
that my grandmother knew better than to touch
and my great-grandmother could never afford,
but she buried their beauty so deep within her heart
that it became written on her very DNA.
A gift to my mother,
to me,
to the daughter I am raising
in a world I do not recognize most days,
but one where fall mums will bloom
like hardy anchors
for the hearts of my granddaughters,
rooting them
in the changing seasons of their lives.
COURTNEY SIEBRING
Courtney Siebring is a poet, voice actor, and playful human who is curious about the intersection between art and faith. She has published two children’s books with Paraclete Press and poetry with The Way Back to Ourselves, The Anselm Society, and Focus on the Family. She offers practices in staying human on Substack @prettyhuman.