"After the Harvest" (Image Courtesy of Wylddane Productions, LLC)
Anthem
Up at midnight, off at noon.
With the slow urgency of pilgrimage
trucks somehow find
ripe rows and pickers
in the roadless night fields.
Tired wives in old slippers
and faint flannel pack warm food
and steel thermoses of coffee into
cardboard boxes, and wait in
kitchens lit only by the neon
ring above the sink
for the next shift of drivers.
Even on the Seventh Day,
no rest.
Only dark October rain
mars the harvest. When fields
percolate and
combines flounder,
the bars in town fill up
like Easter churches,
their congregations
uneasy with leisure.
~Gail Mahr
Up at midnight, off at noon.
With the slow urgency of pilgrimage
trucks somehow find
ripe rows and pickers
in the roadless night fields.
Tired wives in old slippers
and faint flannel pack warm food
and steel thermoses of coffee into
cardboard boxes, and wait in
kitchens lit only by the neon
ring above the sink
for the next shift of drivers.
Even on the Seventh Day,
no rest.
Only dark October rain
mars the harvest. When fields
percolate and
combines flounder,
the bars in town fill up
like Easter churches,
their congregations
uneasy with leisure.
~Gail Mahr
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