When I complained about some of the tedious jobs I had
as a boy, my mother would tell me, Ted, all work is honorable. In this
poem, Don Welch gives us a man who’s been fixing barbed wire fences
all his life.
At the Edge of Town
Hard to know which is more gnarled, the posts he hammers staples into or the blue hummocks which run across his hands like molehills.
Work has reduced his wrists to bones, cut out of him the easy flesh and brought him down to this, the crowbar’s teeth
caught just behind a barb. Again this morning the crowbar’s neck will make its blue slip into wood,
there will be that moment when too much strength will cause the wire to break. But even at 70, he says,
he has to have it right, and more than right. This morning, in the pewter light, he has the scars to prove it.
From Gutter Flowers, Logan House, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Don Welch and
reprinted by permission of Logan House and the author. This weekly column
is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the
Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column
does not accept unsolicited poetry.
This article appears in Jun 1-7, 2006.
