Jake's Flea Market

Good morning: I thought I’d share a bit of the evolution of a poem this morning. In the process of drafting this up, I googled images of Early Modern European peasant women: This poem is the composite sketch of those women. The image that’s linked provide the eyes that are translated from the visual to the poetic--- those lines at the end of the poem.  The crossed-out poem is an earlier version, developed for a male voice: It came to strike me as inefficient. I wanted the poem to be more immediate, so I rewrote it for a female voice. It’s a far better piece for the changes. I was warned once that it’s politically incorrect for a male to write a female voice: My response to that is, while I’m building a poem, my politics are the poem; left to anyone else, it would never have been written.

https://www.paintingstar.com/item-the-old-peasant-woman-s113801.html

study the grandmother
who labours with the season in her soul 
where straw is gathered into bundles

grasped in her gnarled fingers
a rake handle

her sleeve at the elbow
patched

the late spring and the summer
the autumn of her life were all bent
at hard labour

wife   childbirth
ten times a mother 
hunchbacked

her son with the
promise of summer’s green growth 
in his spirit he swings the scythe
that lays the wheat straws flat

both the speed at which he labours
away from her

and how she lags far behind
with her gathering of straws into bundles 

both create him in her eyes

and create her 
in her eyes that follow him


i labour with the season in my spirit
when straw’s gathered into bundles

my experience gnarls my fingers
around the handle of the rake

my discontent is patched
at both elbows

ten times   spring was the crop
harvested from between my thighs

the summer in my womb was
a fruitful orchard

the boughs   overweighted with 
children   bowed toward the roots
and became my bones

the babies   fallen
from the branches out of the orchard
leave my spine stooped

and now that the promise of may
sprouts green into your energy

look at my eyes   as you swing 
the scythe and lay the wheat straws

see the speed at which you mow
away from me

see how i lag
far behind with my gathering 

see me   in my eyes