I left my idealism somewhere
Back in early manhood, apprenticeship
For getting by only.
My knees hurt
Not like they did before, to pay the bills
Dragged in rows by a Commercial Walk Behind Mower
All day
Isn’t it ironic that Wordsworth will sing of
Quarry workers singing as he
Wanders in his daffodils
Whitman will praise the common laborer As he loiters in the grass
The privations, the deprivations
The catalogue of things to do without
Logged into my bitterness–
Formerly an occupation–I try not to be bitter.
I read Hemingway to buoy my spirits–
His Catholic poverty in Paris,
His un-Christian feeling of superiority
Over the vague wealthy. I guess I feel superior
Or try to feel superior to buoy my spirits.
The indignities,
The fear as I lie to a bill-collector,
Slough subordination,
Try to feel above it all.
To dignify the working class
Your sore knees
Must speak more than their pain—
The bills that demand this dignity
The landed idle
Still demand my money
As they loiter
In the end
I will have to forget
The laborious pain
Of achieving a place of less pain.
Pain where?
Will I be able to forget adulthood?
When eternity speaks its demands.
David Fekete 