Day Ten: Green

As Green As

Her compliments wielded less weight
than her insults, which, though never profane,
hit their targets like a blunt mallet:
Seeing anyone bearded, shaggy, unkempt,
she’d say he looked like Hairless Joe.
The naïve, she’d say, were as “green
as goose poots and grass tops.”
Even though we couldn’t always
put a finger on her precise meaning,
young as we were, we rarely struggled
to decipher the tone of her similes
and metaphors. Sizing up the weather
hers never rained cats and dogs,
but “pitchforks and little nekkid babies.”
By the time we knew to shush her
she was too old to listen or to care.