The Homesteader’s Son and Other Poems by Jeremy Paden

And when this house goes down to wrack and ruin,
as it must and will, not just because the brick
and sheetrock are tacked to a rickety frame
of quick growth wood that was not built to stand
for centuries against the wind and rain and rot,
will people still make of this land their home?

And once copper thieves have come and taken all
that’s precious from the walls, once the roof caves in,
once walls buckle and floors give way and water’s
quiet work has dissolved and carried off
the stone and earth that hug and hold this house,
will anyone still remember our names?

When all that’s left is a stoop that leads to nowhere,
will the daffodils still bloom beside the walk?

The Homesteader’s Son

A opening of seams. Terra cotta, burnt umber,
the grit and dust of clay, busted, cut, furrowed,
row after row. The musk of mules, of polecats, old
and rabid, the drying off of a milk cow’s udder.
Just a field hand in your course denim, a ploughboy,
you move up and down the slits you’ve opened,

caliche under your bare foot, sister of stone.

You wait for the cotton boll, green walnut, to fill,
mature, burst open. June’s sun shines high, white, hot,
such was May’s, as will be July’s, and August’s.
In all directions red earth and the shimmering sky.
No buffalo or Indian grass, no bluestem or side-oats left.
Pa ploughed it all into the ground for the cash crop:

a fruit that pricks the calloused hand and hits soft flesh.

What sweetness there was for ma’s beaten biscuits,
stolen from hives kept near the golden mesquite,
is gone. Through cracks narrow as fingernails,
the wandering dust, unbidden gathers, a land
stripped bare. In all directions the sun
blotted out by the wind’s harvest of sand.

In the winter of your year, you marry the war.

We Talk About You and the Great Depression

as if you were not mostly rural folk
who raised what food you ate. “We came up
in an age of want,” you say. We repeat this,
as if why you owned one pair of Sunday clothes
and a sack dress or overalls, maybe two,
in which you planted cotton and milked the cows,
as if the reason every scrap of wood,
every lonely nail and broken plate is still
saved in the garage or basement waiting
for resurrection to a second life
were because a market, in which you had no
interest, crashed, and not that you were born
before the age of trash, or that the house
you managed was based on different futures.

*

Learn more about Jeremy on our Contributors’ Page.

Jeremy’s latest collection, Self-Portrait as an Iguana, is published by Valparaíso Editions USA and is available here.

(Photo: Jim Choate/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)

The 2024 Best in Rural Writing Contest is now underway!

$500 first prize, $200 runner-up. $5 entry fee (with a $10 discount on online writing courses).

Accepting fiction and nonfiction under 6,000 words. To enter, click here.

Deadline: September 30th, 2024

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Jeremy Paden

Jeremy Paden teaches Spanish and Latin American Literature at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Adirondack Review, Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, Hampden Sydney Review, Rattle, and others. He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, two full-length collections, and has translated several Latin American and Spanish poets.

Latest posts by Jeremy Paden (see all)

• The Homesteader’s Son and Other Poems by Jeremy Paden - September 26, 2024