This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month. Carol Wilcox (Carol’s Corner) and Kevin Hodgson, (Kevin’s Meandering Mind) are writing some awesome poetry this month (as always) along with Mary Lee.
Past Time
After the corn failed
he finally gave up the farm
and moved to town having known
for a while that it was long past time
to go work alongside the others
in the factory that banged out
nails for the coffin maker
on the edge of town.
After the whistle blew,
they’d head for the bar
and remember those hard days,
how after they’d cultivated the field
all day under that hot June sun
they’d still have to milk the cows
by the light of the kerosene lamp.
This bar’s better’n that, they’d say,
and then a silence grew as,
heads turned down, they’d watch
memories float and burst
like foam on the beer in front of them,
knowing that soon it would
be past time for them to leave again.
– Steve Peterson
Notes
I’m using images from the New York Public Library’s digital collection, in this case, another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.
As far as the theme? I think I’m working out some of the ways that the rural landscape has changed, my own particular family’s experience with that, and what all that history means for the people who live here. While my grandfather would only rarely be seen in a bar, I do know from family stories of the hardscrabble life so many farmers faced during the Great Depression and, really, through most of the 20th century. The story of the constraints of that farm life and the factory alternative (when there actually were factories to work at!) are pretty deep in the rural Midwest. I guess I’m trying to work out what this all means given the agrarian mythology that you’ll often hear.
PS. There really was a coffin maker on the edge of a town I lived in at one time in my life. And I once did work in a factory that made nails. I spent lunch talking to the men and women that worked there. In the 1970s when I joined them in the factory, many were from the farm at one time, or had relatives struggling through the ’70s on the farm.
- I talked more about his work in the an earlier post. ↩
I followed you, like the farmers following the horses down the rows, hopefully planting a crop of corn, right into that ending where PAST and PASSED merged. This poem is lovely and sad. It echoes with the poem on The Writer’s Almanac today: http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20160410/
I love that about the photo, too, the line of those guys on the cultivators, not close up, but at a distance, as you say, following their horses down the rows. The small corn and a few rocks in the field.
Thanks for the link to the Writer’s Almanac. What a terrific poem, those molecules that “treat us like dirt.” Wow. The disintegrating pictures.
As always, thank you so much for your thoughtful reading and comments, Mary Lee. I learn a bunch from you.
Again:
it was all on faith
that what we planted here
might someday grow
into something of
nourishment
again.
Thank you, Kevin! It really is, every day and all the time, “all on faith” that something “might someday grow.” Here’s to the planting.