My children
didn't eat tonight.
My joints are throbbing with the constant fire
of bone grating against bone,
and my skeleton is tired of holding up it's weight.
My stiffening back and arms have
the insistent ache that comes
when potatoes stubbornly refuse to
leave their piece of earth.
Grab -- twist -- pull -- toss
I must've picked a thousand.
I keep thinking about them,
uprooted from a secure home
and tossed into the machine
that sorts and sizes the good ones
and rejects the others.
And my children didn't eat tonight.
The upturned dirt that suffocates
everything under its gray, gritty curtain
has ground into my children's flesh
and settled into my deep furrows.
A penny a bushel isn't enough,
and my children can't remember
the comfortable nights spent
with their Daddy before the war took him
and the Depression took us.
Somebody else's
child is crying.
My children don't cry.
They turn their short-cropped, lice-filled heads
away from the filth of men and fields,
away from the anguished moans of the disease-devoured,
away from thoughts of the rumbling pains in their neglected stomachs.
They watch
the dog
that I can't affort to feed anymore
to try to learn what living is, since
he's the most alive thing around here.
I can see
the field where I will work tomorrow,
Stretching to the limits
of the blackening horizon.
Its endless.
1993-2001 by Regina M. Raab
This page created: 21 February 2000
This page last updated: 18 February 2001
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