hard times

The way a single frail crocus struggles up through black matted leaves in our garden looks much like the world struggling to throw off this obdurate global recession.  The accumulated crust and weight of old death seems impossible to penetrate.

I slog on.  Fittingly, all my work of late has concerned war or hard times. A few days ago I sent off a manuscript, the memoir of a First World War soldier with my commentary and annotations, to McFarland Publishing, wrote a review of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Seztuan, about a poor prostitute struggling through poverty, added new titles to two of my American history bookstores, the Hard Times Bookstore and the American Labor History Bookstore, where all the news these days has been nothing but hard times.

Also, not too long ago, I wrote the following poem, which will be part of my collection, Stark County Poems: War & the Depression come to Spoon River:

~ ~ ~ ~

Nowhere to Nowhere

When they sold off the farm she took the child
and caught a bus out of town– as for him,
with everyone gone and everything grim,
he opened a pint of bourbon, piled

pictures, letters and clothes in the yard,
doused them in kerosene, struck a match
and watched as they burnt to ashes, watched
and worked on his whiskey, working hard.

The next morning he caught an outbound freight
heading god-knows-where and he didn’t care–
he was down to nothing, a gypsy’s fare–
down to a rusty tin cup and a plate,

dice and a bible, a bedroll and fate,
down to a bone-jarring ride on a train
through country dying and desperate for rain,
running nowhere to nowhere and running late.