Pa

Public Domain via New York Public Library

Pa

There were times I didn’t really like him.
Heck. I hated him sometimes. The chores.
Hot days in the sun pitching loads of hay.
Cold winter mornings in the barn with the cows.
But there were some days I recall, now
that he’s gone, some days when the sun hung low,
and the hay lay mowed and stacked,
sweet green in the late afternoon sun,
on those days we leaned up against the wheel of
the empty wagon, shoulders practically touching.
We listened to the meadowlarks
trill from the fence posts.
Yup.
Maybe these times are all the water a guy needs
to put down roots and
grow into the rest of his life. Maybe
he don't need no more.

-- Steve Peterson

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Notes
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.

Here's another photo from the New York Public Library's digital collection. Another photo taken by Ben Shahn.[1. I talked more about his work in the last post.] Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.

I was struck by the two younger men and the older man partly done with the chores; I say partly done because in the background you can see that there is still some mowing left to do. I began to imagine them as family members and what emerged was a poem about the inevitable conflicts that fathers and sons sometimes feel as they work together, but how much gets passed down despite these conflicts. I tried to write in the voice I imagined for the younger man on the right, at a later time in his life.