Communal Stockings

My sister says, when we were children,

a poor woman sometimes came to the door

and asked to borrow our mother’s stockings—

nylon stockings— to go into town.

That was the respectable way to go,

and our neighbor, who was about 25,

and whose husband beat her,

didn’t have a pair, and our mother did.

We don’t know whether she danced in them,

or anything else, like off and on,

but since she came to the door more than once,

it would seem our mother complied.

Now, many years later, I’m obliged to report:

Mum was some kind of communist.