Matthew Caretti
Pennsylvania Dutch
She was an old soul with a funny accent. The first friends I ushered home from college couldn’t even understand her. But I could. Reveling in stories of her family’s ancestral farm—of brothers too many to name, of milking in the cool before dawn and of baling hay into the twilight of late summer.
her old german heart
consonant shift
of the departing train
Grandma had married well. The youngest boy from a farm family in the neighboring county, who made his way first as an auto mechanic, then owner of his very own Ford dealership. Both of them archetypes of a Depression Era–Lutheran work ethic. But he was too soon gone, and the sudden inheritance puzzled her. So she ignored it and continued to live how she’d learned on the farm. Laundering by hand and mending her worn slacks with crocheted wool patches. On the back porch, calling out the birds by their song. And their silence.
murmuration
the animated tales
of barn starlings
About the Author
Matthew Caretti began publishing his poems in 2009, though his fascination with Eastern short-form genres began much earlier. In 2020, he won the Genjuan International Haibun Contest’s Cottage Prize for “Call to Prayer” and received Honorable Mention recognition for “The Car in the Petrol Station Lot” in the Haiku Society of America’s Haibun Contest.