A version of this poem was published in The Wilmington Review years ago. I have revised it several times since it was published. .This is the latest.
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Song Of The Migrant Workers
Julie Buffaloe-Yoder
Their shacks, a row of scabs
on the hot, red backs of rows
where naked children
with broken eyes
stare at the noon-white sky
and shuffle little feet
through dust, gnats, hope.
.
With skin like sweat damp tobacco,
they work from six in the morning
’til eight at night, six days a week
for two rooms and a few dollars.
Heads bent low, they wear nothing
but red bandanas, burlap sacks, sun.
.
Sundays, they wake before dawn
and bathe in an irrigation pond.
They go to church in a condemned
general store with no pews
and stay long after we have
eaten way too much for supper.
.
Their tambourines shake with God
as they sing of the Kingdom coming,
snorting horses, stark dark revelations.
Their voices rise like rainbows
through thunder cracked clouds.
.
Night grows fat outside our windows
when they speak in unknown tongues.
The wind remembers their notes.
The ground trembles beneath our feet.
.
.
.
This is all so amazing. The next to last stanza just blows. me. out. of. the. water…HOLY MOLY!
It reminds me of some research I did on the Mexican/American border. It’s just sad the way humans ignore each other, really.
Hey, Holly! How’s it going? Your research sounds interesting. I never knew any migrants on the coast of NC, though there were lots of poor folks.
The poem was inspired when I took a trip upstate. I was a kid, feeling all sorry for myself, then I briefly met some really good people who were migrants. It blew me away. For the first time, I realized how fortunate I was. At least I had the hope of scholarships, pell grants, whatever. They didn’t even have basic necessities, much less school.
Thanks so much, Holly. Your comments are awesome, as you are:)
There are so many great descriptions here!
I love these lines:
and shuffle little feet
through dust, gnats, hope.
And yes, I do feel the shaking…
Hi, yubuzlizzard & thank you. Your comments are always appreciated. Oh yes, the shaking. Great last line in your comment. The shaking comes eventually, one way or another, when people are hurting for long enough. Thanks again & have a beautiful day.
Hi Julie. It’s always a good day for me when you bless us with a poem. So much I love about this poem. Gut grabbing images. The “scabs” of houses got me instantly and actually took me into scenes from “The Grapes of Wrath” and places I’ve been in Mexico. Yes, I know it happens outside of the Depression and developing countries, but I wonder why it’s hidden in our literature and in our lives.
With your poetry, there’s always how you write and what you write about to respond to and always, for me, it’s difficult to tell you what your poetry “does” – because it does so much. I do love the lines that yuzublizzard mentions and I would have too. But also “skin like sweat damp tobacco”, the way they wear the sun, the way the tambourines “shake with God”, the voices rising “like rainbows/through thunder cracked clouds.”
Wonderful. And yes, “The ground trembles beneath our feet.”
Thank you sistah.
Hi, hysperia sister! Some awesome points. “Hidden in our literature and in our lives” is the perfect way to describe it.
I should have told everyone it wasn’t really that long ago…about twenty years. There are still people who live like this. Things have gotten a lot better, at least where I live now. There’s an outreach program, tutors, lots of the kids are in school. But there are still the people who fall through the cracks, so it’s certainly not easy for them. In other areas of the country, it may be much worse.
The particular people who inspired my poem worked for well off people for very little money and really did go to church…all day long…on their one day off. I wanted to throw in some judgment day retribution for them:)
Thanks again for your wonderful comments!
When I was driving home this summer from Ontario “cottage country”, I took a back road to avoid the superhighway I hate. I drove through the back country called “Holland Marsh” where much of Ontario’s produce is grown. One of the summer’s hundred thunder storms was threatening. I looked into a field and saw hundreds of straw hat topped people, hunched down over the crops, picking. I looked closer to the edge of the field and saw, Mexican faces. In Ontario. It made me ashamed.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081102.whomeless1102/BNStory/International/home
The thunderstorm gives me chills. There’s that connection again. What an image. I know what you mean. I wouldn’t think twice about it if they were paid a living wage. I’ve worked in fish houses, on boats, and have done some pretty grungy work under the table. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was more than many migrants make. What bothers me is greed and exploitation of human beings.
There’s also the health and safety factor. If an owner is paying someone a buck or two an hour under the table to work, how much does that owner really care about the health and safety of the worker? I heard a story from our guys at work about an industrial egg farm that was eventually closed for EPA violations. The workers were migrants and were shoveling huge piles of chicken crap. They didn’t even have respirators.
Shew…I get myself so worked up! Sorry for yet another rant. But thanks for being the beautiful person you are:)
And thanks for the link, hysperia. The evil in the world blows my mind. I guess I’m still a starry eyed kid at heart, because I’m always shocked by pure evil.
What a powerful poem. Everything about the children is so vivid, from their raggedy clothes to the songs in the church. I love “night grows fat” and wearing “sun.”
Gorgeous, sublime, poem.
Thank you, Christine. It’s always wonderful to see you here. I appreciate your kind comments.
Goodness, Miss Julie, you sure can paint a vivid picture with your word palette. Stunning.
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Miss Julie is music to my ears, my Carolina sister! Thanks for your kind words. Here’s some sugar from Miss Julie
Another eye-opener that reveals so much about human nature and relations. The Golden Rule is, unfortunately, not a famous one in the tug-o-war between labor and management. Child labor? Oh, how it makes my hackles rise (pardon the expression).
It’s a mind-blowing piece, Julie, from the title to the ending. Each line is an experience with which to weigh one’s own.
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Another sister I’m glad to have met. Thank you, S.L. for your thoughtful comments, as always. Maybe I should rename it Power to the People? Ah, but that’s already been used:) Thanks again and have a beautiful day. -Julie
Great poem. I especially love:
They go to church in a condemned
general store with no pews
and stay long after we have
eaten way too much for supper.
Do you usually continue to work on poems after they have been published? Is there ever a time you feel a poem is done or are poems always opportunities for revisions for you?
I really enjoy re-working poems I thought I’d finished years ago (not that any of mine are published) but not all of them. Some just seem done and I’m not sure what makes them so.
Hi, Brigindo. I am SO glad you asked that question!! I love hearing other perspectives on the creation process. It’s very interesting to me how other people do it, too.
Yes, I keep revising, even after a poem is published. It’s usually a year or so later when I begin the revision, and I never stop. I don’t know if never-ending revision is a bad thing or a good thing. It’s just something I can’t help but do. Maybe it’s just neurosis? Lack of self esteem? Or a desire for perfection that will never be attained?
Personally, I only have a couple of poems I feel are finished. Weird, huh? Even those aren’t really finished, because I still pick them up sometimes and adjust commas or little words here and there. But they are my most complete ones, thematically and structurally.
I don’t have a hard and fast rule for “why” a poem isn’t finished. It sounds like you have the same type of “feel” for the finished piece as I do. Usually, it’s because my rhythm feels off. Even on my best poems, I know when I have been lazy with a word or a phrase. A poet usually knows when he or she can get away with something if it’s buried in the middle of a kick ass piece. Lazy but true. Plus, we get excited about showing it to others, so we want to get it out there.
And then there’s the maturity factor. A lot of the poems I wrote when I was eighteen don’t please me now (like this one was originally). The theme remains the same, but there were words in it like “ancient.” Egad. Everything’s ancient to a teenager. Overly dramatic words. And I had the word orange in it, because I thought it was so cool that nothing rhymes with orange. LOL! I’ll probably end up changing broken eyes.
Some of the lines and phrases are identical, though. I was just thinking today that it would be cool if I could find all the drafts (I doubt it…I can hardly find my ass with both hands) and put them all together to see the process.
I’m sorry to pelt you with so much here, Brigindo! As you can see, I don’t know the answer. Now my juices are flowing. What makes a poem complete? When the poet says it is? When the reader says it is? Great questions.
Thank you!! Please feel free to add more thoughts, and I’ll try to contain myself:)
too many excellent lines to mention–loved this
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Thanks, Scot! Good to see you. -Julie
I wouldn’t think it was lack of confidence but what you are saying about who you were at 18 makes a lot of sense. Even without a dramatic passing of time, we change after we write. The original impetus to write that particular poem may still be there but we are a different person. I like the thought of bringing my new self to the words and images my old self created. I’m a big “life is a path” person so the thought that a poem can always be evolving is comforting to me.
Perhaps some poems stop because we can no longer connect with that part of our former self? We can look back on that person in that moment kindly and generously but we are not them????
Interesting stuff.
Thanks again for your awesome comments, Brigindo. I especially like what you say about looking back on that person in a moment kindly and generously…even though it’s no longer who we are.
If any teenagers happen to be reading this, please accept my apologies. I don’t mean to make fun of 18-year-old poets (I’m just a crotchety dinosaur, y’all…don’t mind me). I can look back at that poem now and really like that person. She cared about something many people don’t think twice about. She was honing her craft, and it was beautiful work. Now I wonder why I disliked myself so much back then.
Great observations, Brigindo. I really appreciate it. I got so charged up last night that I finally put endings on two of my short stories. They’re not finished, though:)
Mom,
I like your conversation about what makes a poem complete. I find that my own writings (typically in screenplay format) are similar in that I’m constantly re-writing things, setting them aside, picking them back up months later and re-writing them again. When looking at some of my previous film/video pieces, I do often wish I could revisit them. Although the nature of the medium makes revisions difficult.
George Lucas is quoted as saying “A movie is never finished, just abandoned.” However, I’m not sure I agree (and I wish he’d stop “revisiting” his own films!). Film by its nature is collaborative – from the crew, the actors, the director, the writer, the editor – even the audience is collaborative. And although the filmmaker has the discretion to revisit the film and make adjustments, once the film is created and released to the public, it is very difficult to make those changes have significance. I consider film to be more of an organic event – it very rarely (at least in my experience) fits 1 person’s exact vision, rather it takes on a life of its own.
Sorry to steer the conversation away from poetry, just felt like putting this out there!
Hi, Amber! Oh, please don’t apologize for talking about film. Your comments are so interesting. I don’t know anything about screenwriting or making a film, so I love to hear those perspectives. I also encourage others to feel free to join in about other mediums, too.
Your George Lucas comment made me laugh. He does like to revisit those films, doesn’t he? Ha! But I also like what you say about the organic nature of film. Maybe fiction has more of those elements, since it is more widely read than poetry. Once a novel is out there in the public eye…it takes on a life of its own for the individual reader. If an author wrote a novel and I loved it, then he/she changed it a few years later and released a revision in its place, I might be annoyed. Poetry seems more open to different versions of the same theme, since it is often a moment in the palm of a hand.
Your collaborative comments are also awesome! I tend to write in solitude, with the door closed. The one collaborative piece I wrote with Holly and Nathan was a great experience. I did, however, find myself going back and wanting to change MY lines. I didn’t want to change their lines. I thought theirs were perfect. But it wouldn’t make sense to change my lines, because then the change would affect their lines. So I left my lines alone and accepted them. Hmmm….
Another excellent comment you make is that film rarely fits one person’s exact vision. So true!
Take care and please feel free to tell us more about film or screenwriting anytime. The differences are interesting, and I do think there are similarities. I have watched films that are quite poetic in their structure.
Thanks so much, Amber! I’m charged up again! Ha!
A beautiful poem and sentiment. how do you keep revising? My poems are like my babies – hard to see them go.
Hi, Diane. That makes a lot of sense. You have a good perspective. Seeing them as babies you nourish and watch grow. Then there comes a time when we let the babies grow up. Nice.
I think I’m probably just crazy as a loon:)
Thanks for your kind comments and good point.
Oh you are so good. In fact so good I can almost taste it. Whenever I read you I get a rush. No kidding.
Okay that comment just made me sound like a weird serial killer…….lol.
Hello, Jo! I must be the weird one, because when I read your first comment, I was all happy you said it. Ha! Ha! I know what you mean, though. It’s a nice compliment. And I really appreciate it.
Очень полезно
Вы. Я не знаю русского, поэтому я надеюсь что мой переводчик правильно.
Found you through Christine Swint’s Balanced on the Edge; I just commented at a March 2011 entry. This poem about migrant workers brought me to tears. I grew up near a large migrant enclave, if you will. While we lived on a nice family farm, the area only a few miles from us, was filled with orange groves, lined with cabins so filthy no dog would want to sleep in them, yet human beings were trapped there, at least through the 1970′s and beyond… Though slavery was beaten about 100 years before I first saw a ” migrant camp”, the “living” conditions were so foul, when driving past, you could smell the sorrow….thank you for your words. I’d LOVE a signed copy of this poem, if you are willing.
Peace to you
The March 2011 entry I commented on, was here at YOUR blog, Julie.
Hello, Lisa! I adore Christine (and her work). Her heart shines through in all that she does.
Your description of the camp where you lived sounds like some of the ones I have seen. They were heartbreaking. “Smell the sorrow” is so accurate.
When I met the sweet folks who inspired this poem, I had been feeling sorry for myself. I grew up in poverty. I was young at the time…and full of angst about my “lot” in life. It seemed so unfair that I was walking around with holes in my shoes, while middle class students threw things away that would be a treasure for me.
The migrant workers made me realize just how privileged I was. I had the opportunity to go to school. I had many opportunities they didn’t have. Another thing that impressed me was their spirit. They were such beautiful people!
Thank you very much for your comments and good words, Lisa. It’s a pleasure to meet you:) I’ll also check out your link and say hello.