Past Time

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.

Public Domain via the New York Public Library

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

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I'm using images from the New York Public Library's digital collection, in this case, another photo taken by Ben Shahn.[1. I talked more about his work in the earlier post.] 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.