Poems about My Father on Father's Day

A young couple live in Florida during the Great Depression when jobs are scarce and a young man must do what he has to do to keep his family housed and fed. 

The Ice House Job

After working 9 hours in the hot Florida sun,

he came home to eat a meal with her and his kids.

She told him how she wished he could stay with her

and rest, let her rub his back. I get scared here without you.

But he said he had to pay the rent, put food on the table.

As the kids were tucked into bed, he climbed

into his old truck, headed to work.

It should have been a relief after the sun burned

his skin to dark brown leather, but he wore his ragged

jacket and a cap with flaps over his ears

as if he had walked into dead of winter in Wisconsin.

Alone in the quiet he wondered how long could he go on

working two jobs, getting little sleep.

His back, tired from plowing mules all day,

his hands cold and chapped, he chopped

the fifty pound blocks. With both hands he clamped

the tongs that griped the slippery squares, swung his shoulders

tossing his burden up on the platform, over and over

until the clock said midnight, quitting time.

He climbed into bed too tired to bathe.

Her hand reached through the night,

touched his face. He slept but she lay awake

thinking of going home to Georgia, seeing her folks,

hearing him laugh again, and tell his stories to the kids.

After forty years of farming, a man can't just sit down and quit. He rises early every day and works a large plot of ground that feeds his children and grandchildren all summer, if only they would come and harvest his crop.

     

Daddy with his granddaughter, Carrie, on his birthday. Note the baseball player and the baseball on the cake. He loved baseball and was a very good player when he was a young man.

 Gardener

Once he cultivated vast acres of cotton,

peanuts, harvested bounteous crops 

Grey haired, now he sits in his frayed lawn chair,

sweat staining his chambray shirt, pock-marked

with burn holes from his Pall Malls.

His stooped frame rests from a morning

spent spraying tomatoes, trying to murder

small bugs who battle him for his harvest.

His eyes survey a pristine garden.

Tall corn and green beans climb twine

strung on poles in rows equally distanced.

Piles of summer squash strewn on clean straw

hide under leaves large as sun hats.

He caresses the cropped ears of his canine friend.

The cigarette ash grows long. He hardly notices

the shortened smoke, the fire against his callouses.

            ---Glenda Council Beall

Green Eggs - Where's the Ham?

My kind and thoughtful neighbor, Alice, brought me some "yard eggs."
I love fresh eggs and those in the super market are days old when we buy them. These fresh eggs came from interesting chickens, I'm sure, because the eggs are green on the outside. Of course, inside, as you can see, the yolk is very yellow and the whites don't run all over the pan. That is the sign of a fresh yard egg.

For my city friends, we call these yard eggs because the chickens are not penned up, but feed on grass and bugs, not some chemically mixed feed with unknown particles of animals and grain.

If I had enough room and enough energy to care for them, I'd love to have a few laying hens. I remember how my mother fed her big Bardrock and White Leghorn chickens. Although they ran lose and were able to forage on natural food, she would sometimes throw out leftover bread. The feathered group would run to her like they were starving, but of course they were not.

My favorite chickens were the little ones. I love the photo on Brenda Kay Ledford's blog today. A close up of golden bitties or is it biddies? Sometimes in early spring when it was a bit too cold,  a little pen full of baby chicks warmed near the heater. We enjoyed chickens and were thankful for them as we ate eggs every day.

How differently I came to feel about them years later. Like many farmers trying to hold on to their land, my family built chicken houses - huge long buildings with small cages that held four chickens. They spent their lives crowded  in those cages where they laid eggs every day.  I couldn't bear to go  there. I was assured that was the way it had to be for the farmer and the wholesaler to make any money.

The stench from those chicken houses was another reason I changed my feelings about chickenss. Although the chicken farm was as far from our houses as possible, when the wind blew a certain way, it carried the smell of those miserable chickens with it.

Few of those types of chicken farms still exist in our area here in NC nor in the place I grew up. I am grateful for that.
However, in many places today cows are not pastured anymore, but kept in small feed lots until they get to the right weight, and then they are butchered. Dairy cows are done the same way. The commercials on television want us to believe that our milk comes from cows that roam over nice green fields, the way they did on our farm when I was young. But most of them, today, never see a green field.

Here in our mountains where life is slow and people still cling to the old ways, chickens run out, cows graze on green hills, and little yellow chicks are not just for sale at Easter time.