Clysta Seney McLemore: A favorite poem

Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard
by Kay Ryan

I spent the first decade of this millennium caring for my parents — a great honor.  Mom was a teenager during the Great Depression.  She fell in love with my father who left to serve his country in WWII.  She taught school while she waited, and they married when he returned.  Living in tiny California farming towns she raised five children.  Kay Ryan’s poem “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” reminds me of her life and of the importance of being soft.

A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn out place;
beneath her hand,
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space
—however small—
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.

Kay Ryan