Keepsake
- Keepsake
On the famous path by the river,I stoop and pick up a Buckeyeto keep in my pocket.
It is mine this river as it flows pastyour house which is also mine, flowspast
its banks of paw pawsand cowcumber trees, with their noddingsaucer leaves.
The river's rifflesfroth by the shoal before they runfull out, gurgling their
pebbly songs. You havetaken the tune out of them and gone.I have this Buckeye. [End Page 95]
Noel Smith spent several years in Leslie County, Kentucky, as a social worker for the Frontier Nursing Service in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes visiting her clients on horseback. A native New Yorker, she returned home where she taught elementary school. Her book The Well String includes narrative poems about the people she knew while in Kentucky. She now lives in the lower Hudson Valley of New York.
