Dustbowl Momma
Migrant worker, tuck your wind-torn baby to your lap.
Weighing down each shoulder, your shy children hide
from the camera. When soil doesn’t yield crops,
kids come instead.
This is your America now. Wind
wasted the land you left behind.
It had started as an orphan breeze,
unloved and angry, just a delinquent
dust cloud spitting and cussing hate.
Then, unleashing in cyclonic swirls,
a wrath so powerful, it ripped flesh off topsoil,
slapping faces raw, stinging eyes to mourn.
It got in everything. Earth became air.
Coffee tasted like ashes, food powdered in bits of dirt.
And there was no point in cleaning
anything, including yourselves.
That’s when the wind took with it your heart,
and surrender slipped in to face you over
the kitchen table as clay particles taunted outside
dirty windows, glinting in the prairie sun.
It came to you hard, this giving up.
You wept the tears of breaking.
And the way you used to live, same as the way
your daddy and momma lived before is just a handful
of dust, migrating mirages like heat reflecting
illusions of water off parched roadways.
Now sometimes, when your man’s off with the boys
and your children sleep, you smell it in warm night air, the house
way across this vast country, sweet-scented in the day’s cooking,
dark in love and dreams, waiting to again call you home.
