Hot purple, the whole house smelled of it.
The giant pot, rust-dusted, gleaming proud,
and crowded round the counter, rows on rows
of fresh-filled, heat-sealed jars, their cooling tops
each popping loud, a witness song of stops
so strong the juice would keep for years to come.
I’d grip a towel-wrapped jar in my small hands,
Mom tipped the pot, the boiling juice ran in.
Mom always, in her hopeful teaching, said:
It wasn’t wine that Jesus drank, but juice.
So, as a child, I thought I knew the Boy,
whose harvest home, like mine, of purple smelled;
who gripped hot jars while Mother filled them up,
some stray drops breaking darkly on the floor.
Benjamin Wright will be graduating from Brigham Young University in April 2021 with a BS in Exercise & Wellness, and a Creative Writing minor. He is in the process of applying to MFA programs around the United States to continue his studies of poetry.
