Dale Gregory Cozart | + Follow Poet |
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The Potato Eaters: 1852-1960

A litany of states have we been through
and countries if one counts the past.
From eras gone we came as people who
could turn the soil and make a life at last.
We sailed from bankrupt English mines
and Irish tubers rotting in the ground,
to Ellis Island like human vines
imaging that we had found
a clement life of fruit—rock and blight
could not feed the hungry ones--
and taste the bud of ended plight,
absent ourselves from absent funds.
We knelt in fields of withered grain
and left for other nameless towns,
then westward to the siren plains
of Kansas and Dakota to put down
stakes.  The Homestead Act would give us land
to raise a crop and fill the dearth
begot from living mouth-to-hand.
But as we tended rows of earth
through war and fever, Great Depression
and still birth, the land was never ours to keep;
sold off here and there as a lesson
that the suffering shall always weep
in shacks where floors are made of dirt.
But on Judgment Day we'd come to rest
with Jesus.  He would vanquish all the hurt
of young disciples grown old with pain
from years of thankless labor on the land
where fathers passed the lot to sons again,
and take us up to heaven as He planned.
But as we lowered bodies in the ground
adorning graves of loved ones dead and gone
with plastic flowers we the living found
that our reward was farther on.

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