By Jackie Joice
from her book Green Grapes Black Hands
This poem isn’t about sunsets and sunrise
or landscapes and otherwise.
It’s about the blood of grapes and hard
labor, sweat, and bone in scorching fields,
accompanied by cheap wages for picking
pounds and pounds of cotton and grapes.
Wine grapes that were processed with
mechanical feet,
smashed.
It’s about blood-speckled white afro puffs
being picked for Rodeo Drive clothing
stores.
It’s about white afro puffs being picked to
the hymns of harmonicas bought in Texas
for twenty-five cents.
It’s about whore rates for seamstresses
working twelve hours straight,
blood from Dust Bowl survivors.
Migrating
herd
hooves
sheep
like cattle packed in tents with grit.
It’s solely about the perspective of a
dislocated
city chick to country parents,
but not country like down in the Mississippi
Delta country,
but Central California country.
This poem is no click of your boots to the
Midwest type of Oz.
This poem is about the heartland of
California,
about bodies in fields, picking green grapes
with black hands.
I siphon whiskey from these grapes,
and now I am drunk with
the Kings River Blues.
This is a heart-moving poem. I would like to share the link with my writers online group.
Perfect from beginning to end. Gritty and graceful in its expression of pain, outrage, and suffering. Eloquent!!!