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.