There are few still alive
who remember my little girl hair,
which I, of course, cannot recall.

Except that my earliest memories
tug like the brush through
unruly ringlets that my mother
tried to calm, if not tame.

All these years later—after bouts
of attempted straightening,
even in college going full permanent
that made me look, as my colleagues
at one newspaper fondly said,
like a blizzardhead—

I wear my hair short,
let it curl whichever crazy way
it wants.

Bright sunlight turns it the color
of a woolly, pewter-tinged cloud,
and I imagine those who held me
and combed me and fussed over me
more than six decades ago,
looking down from their perch
in the forever,

nodding and smiling at this
slow pupil finally coming to
embrace these curls inherited
from those who made her,
this hair that she
has come to love.