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
Walking behind a power-mower
All day
Isn’t it ironic that Wordsworth will sing of
Quarry workers singing as he
Wanders in his daffodils
Whitman praises the common laborer
As he loiters in the grass
The privations, the deprivations
The catalog 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
To 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.
While the town keeps me down.
To dignify the working class—
Which I am now and a grad student
And the town keeps me down—
Your sore knees
Must speak more than their pain—
The bills that demand their “dignity”
The landed idle
Still demand my money
As they loiter
Though,
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 