Third Daughter

Milton Jordan

November 2, 2025

Marie Anne set about to round us up

that October she reached sixty, a boomer

born along a river not the Neches;

younger by years than we, born beside

that reluctant red-dirt current, replaced 

now by the swift gurgles of the Sabinal

running clear, across a rocky bed,

audible from the west bank back porch

of her birthplace, where we’d moved the summer

after the war began, and she’d married,

birthed our three nieces and now gathered 

a widely dispersed crowd of siblings

and significant others to celebrate 

the birthday she shared with her youngest.

Milton Jordan lives with Anne in Georgetown, Texas. He co-edited the first Texas Poetry Assignment anthology, Lone Star Poetry, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022.