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Handiwork
- By Howard Lachtman
- Photographs by Rich Turner
- November 15, 2021
- 7:29 pm
- One Comment
I can’t imagine poetry
in this vast, flat land,
this bowl-shaped valley
whose rivers are harnessed
to feed crops and whose poverty
sprouts like weeds between fields
of stooped laborers,
said the visiting professor of poetry,
frowning at the sprawling San Joaquin
as if it lacked any source, any hope of inspiration.
Leave your imagination at home, I urged.
Take a ride on a crowded van of farm workers
rumbling through the darkness before dawn,
men who have little time for words, overworked
as the soil, their hands calloused and blunt
from picking asparagus and lettuce,
cherries, strawberries, peaches and plums
whose consumers, remote from the handiwork,
assume food comes to life for them on demand
in the magical aisles of supermarkets.
Poems also grow in these fields,
resilient despite heat and dust,
despite the acrid air of wildfires
and increasing cycles of drought
that warn us an age of peril has commenced
and the life we take for granted is passing.
As if you could forget that
when you sit down to write
about this valley, this heartland
whose poems are also part of the earth
and come to your hand with no easy labor.
Howard Lachtman, a self-described “retired amateur outfielder and frequently baffled batter,” is also a retired reporter and editor, and the author of crime and detective stories, film noir studies, and a history of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s visits to America. In his Delta Detective series written for Soundings, Lachtman introduces a private detective based in the Delta whose wide-ranging investigations offer a diversity of clients and a casebook of crimes.
- By Howard Lachtman
- Photographs By: Rich Turner
- November 15, 2021
- 7:29 pm
- One Comment
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One Comment
I really like your poem! It invoked a sense of history in San Joaquin! Great use of imagery and juxtaposition of the beauty vs. the hardship of the region. Good job.