Conversation Over Coffee
(Mickey is rambling . . .)
Our father’s days were made for aching –
Their youth spent crooked over a field.
The crows screamed at the mighty heat, baking
The clay that generational sweat had tilled.
The scarecrow shares their strange expression,
Shocked gesture-less by artillery shells;
Or by the unchecked expanding direction
Of progress and its spiraling hells.
Our parents met in schools,
Sometimes in smoky wood-worn bars.
Their hands swollen by blistering tools
And pasts with filial scars.
They would cling to one another tight
As terror is prone to do,
Their faces red their knuckles white
But little of them blue.
They seem a hard, Cro-Magnon race,
Whose wrists drag the measured ground,
But the quietude of their resilient grace
Points where hard-bearing truths abound.
I did not know it then, and only slightly now:
Love’s attrition often wears it stronger,
Forged and pounded even longer
Than the yester-born, raging violence of pick and plow.