Contributed by:
Tabitha Dial, YourHub.com
Article Contributed on: 4/21/2006 10:15:19 AM
Hello, dear reader!
Per Friday tradition, here's the poem of the week from
American
Life in Poetry... it makes me think of my father, who I view as
a tireless worker. It also reminds me a little about my job at
times...
Every detail needs to be just right, you know.
And I've been thinking lately that I need to claim some
vacation time-- I've been fighting allergies or a cold or SOMETHING
for a week now and, well, that really has me dreaming about not
coming to work.
Thanks for the read.
Verse from American Life in Poetry
By
Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate
When I complained about some of the tedious jobs I had as a
boy, my mother would tell me, Ted, all work is honorable. In this
poem,
Don Welch gives us a man who's been fixing
barbed wire fences all his life.
At the Edge of Town
Hard to know which is more gnarled,
the posts he hammers staples into
or the blue hummocks which run
across his hands like molehills.
Work has reduced his wrists
to bones, cut out of him
the easy flesh and brought him
down to this, the crowbar's teeth
caught just behind a barb.
Again this morning
the crowbar's neck will make
its blue slip into wood,
there will be that moment
when too much strength
will cause the wire to break.
But even at 70, he says,
he has to have it right,
and more than right.
This morning, in the pewter light,
he has the scars to prove it.
From "Gutter Flowers," Logan House, 2005. Copyright (c) 2005
by Don Welch and reprinted by permission of Logan House and the
author. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation,
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept
unsolicited poetry.
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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online
publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary
American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote
poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence
for poetry in our culture.