Easter Morning
On Easter morning all over America
the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.
We're not supposed to have "peasants"
but there are tens of millions of them
frying potatoes on Easter morning,
cheap and delicious with catsup.
If Jesus were here this morning he might
be eating fried potatoes with my friend
who has a '51 Dodge and a '72 Pontiac.
When his kids ask why they don't have
a new car he says, "these cars were new once
and now they are experienced."
He can fix anything and when rich folks
call to get a toilet repaired he pauses
extra hours so that they can further
learn what we're made of.
I told him that in Mexico the poor say
that when there's lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.
He laughed.
Like peasants everywhere in the history
of the world ours can't figure out why
they're getting poorer. Their sons join
the army to get work being shot at.
Your ideals are invisible clouds
so try not to suffocate the poor,
the peasants, with your sympathies.
They know that you're staring at them.
Jim Harrison [1937-2016]
from Saving Daylight, ©Copper Canyon Press, 2007
Could taste those potatoes in the first line. Ate many a skillet of fried "Arsh" potatoes growing up; the bacon grease and sometimes chopped onion gave them flavor under rivers of ketchup. Of course they taste different when that's all you have, day after day after day. Thanks for sharing this poignant and lovely poem, connecting "peasants" from many places.
Thinking of my Dad who called himself a tinkerer, of the old 46 Chevy that sat out in our pasture for years as he kept the newer cars running. The well and septic system , the electric fences, he kept them all going, all while he milked the cow every day and baled hay in the summer. On our small farm, if my dad couldn’t fix it, it wouldn’t get fixed. And he worked full-time at a union job in a meat packing plant. I can’t tell my story anymore without telling his story, and my Mom’s, and their parents and grandparents and their ancestors. The older I get, the more I feel their presence, as real now as it was 50 years ago. Sometimes my sense of connection to them is overwhelming. This is a beautiful poem, thank you.