Summer Peaches
This haibun and haiku need re-writing
Have you ever written a poem, been satisfied with a draft, and then later, when you’re doing something completely different—say, driving to your first day of a new school year—and know all of a sudden that the poem is all wrong?
In case you’ve never had that experience, learn from mine. ha!
This 1939 photo is from the Farm Security Administration and archived at the Library of Congress. Read the haibun and haiku below and see if you can spot what’s wrong. I’ll put the answer in the first comment to this post.
Grocery boy leaning on basket of peaches, Muskogee, Oklahoma. 1939 July. Library of Congress
This poem wants the photographer to see strength in the young man’s gaze — it says, “It’s not much, but these bushels are what I’ve got.” He hopes to earn enough to buy gas for the truck and Mom’s list: a tin of milk, pound of flour, a quarter pound of sugar, and one box of salt. If there are extra pennies, he’ll buy two pink canada mints to savor on the drive back home. This farmer’s son knows today’s hopes are more necessity than luxury. There’s been precious little these years of dust and learning to dry-land farm. If hopes were his alone, he’d put cash into re-buying the foreclosed acres, keep back a little to take Suze to the pictures…maybe think about a ring. He’d take one of those business classes at State University. But these are more tomorrow wishes than today’s hope. He has eight real bushels of hope to sell today. spare summer harvest coins of hope saved — peach by peach bushel by bushel Linda M. 8/14
Head on over the our talented friend, Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone for today’s round-up of poetry goodness.
If you look more carefully, than I did originally at the photo, the caption describes "Grocery boy leaning on basket of peaches, Muskogee, Oklahoma." I wrote this poem from the point of view of a farmer, not a grocery store employee in 1939. This is probably largely from the gripping experience of listening to Kristen Hannah's 'The Four Winds,' this summer.
For sure, the grocery boy has a story impacted by life in 1939...but it's probably not the same as a farmer boy.
It might not be a big deal in the grand scheme of drafting a poem for Poetry Friday...but...it's important to me that I represent the photo more accurately. This poem is getting a re-write!
You are forgiven… because it is this kind of hope — the -grocery store workers and farmers facing down dust and despair of the late 1930’s — that raised us and gives us an inkling of what it means to work when hard things are hard. 💝