Working People's Poetry Competition
WINNER 2012



New Work Gloves
    for Sam Campagna

Sawdust everywhere. Chunks of it in my hair
and beard, in my boots up to the ankles. Pockets full of it,
Sawdust is my medium of exchange. And in the passenger
compartment, peeping up through sawdust like baby bantams
at the feed store -- left one's face down, right's up, heel hooked
under the socket set on the floorboard, pointing finger wagging at me
in easy synch with the pickup's dirt roads hardbop as if to say,
You've not done enough today, and not cheerily enough.

I consider all the trees we felled, bucked, choked and pulled out of
Lacelle's gully up Double Culverts with Sam's beat pickup
and comshawed cable. My lower back's answer enough,
that and Gibbon's agora-bellow across the Safeway last night --
Man you're too old for that shit. But I feel fine now,
sweat drying cool on my face like a buckeye wrinkling.
Half-leather, none of those fake-cotton acrylic thingies
for the kid -- I'd go through three pairs before lunch
and drop my chainsaw a time or two, too.

Across the one-lane bridge mind's running again
over the old civic terrain. Still damned little worthy of allegiance
outside family and friends, and most of the time I do believe the bastards
are gonna blow us up, or we'll snuff ourselves, overstuffed on stuff --
the fat-city citizenry on the sidelines either way, waving
little flags and belting-out chorus upon chorus of jingo bells.
Yet, how can I say I believe in my kids (and their kids) and not believe
in the future? Not believe we'll leave enough boards and nails,
not to mention uncut trees -- enough sanity to distinguish what nourishes
from the prevalent garbage on this scrapheap we're all chopping drilling
ripping stripping paving craving and raving over? (Real questions)

Not withstanding which, I can still appreciate how fine this day --
how blue the sky, clean the air, how gloriously different the various greens
and yellows of upraised fir, downcast redwood, straight and ambling tanoak
ever seeking sun. Oregon maple, madrone and its runt-of-the-litter cousin
manzanita. Bay laurel, ponderosa, chinquapin, black and white oak --
even if I can't remember how to tell those two apart. All as-is,
I need nothing more than home now -- pumice hand cleaner and a
hot shower. Dusk settles like a log on coals, and the gloves as I
glance down there again just gloves, within sawdust and the incoming dark.

      Sanford Dorbin


Enter your Poem
NOW
For Next Year's Contest

If you like this kind of Poetry
You'll Like the
Blue Collar Review