“. . . a contemporary sculpture representing the barbed fences white settlers
used to deny native North American communities food sources.”
— From the British Museum’s “What’s On” flyer advertising
the exhibit, Feeding History: The Politics of Food
How history tilts time through its multiple hands
Where the word white embodies immigrants escaping
segregation, starvation, and persecution
Grandparents who homesteaded on dry land prairie
with pairs of cows, horses, pigs, chickens, and turkeys
With whom they’d shared a railroad car for days
Those flesh-blood-and-bone hands dug a well
A root cellar where the family lived until the same hands
built a two-room shack with no insulation
A barn, outhouse, toolshed, smokehouse
slaughterhouse and icehouse
Those hands cobbled shoes
Cooked, sewed and mended clothes for a family of nine
Grew a garden and canned food for 40-below winters
Made candles for night light and lye soap from the fat
of butchered animals to bathe for Sunday service
All of them using the same three inches of cold water
carried in buckets to a tin tub
How they lived in isolation through diseases
food poisonings and home births
Fought fires, drought, dust and locust storms, hail
snowbanks taller than men, ice, gophers, coyotes
wolves, rattlesnakes, rodents, and grasshoppers
How the children at age five got hoes for birthday presents
So their hands could plow manure into fields
After they tamed sagebrush, tumbleweed, cheatgrass
buffalo grass and rocks into wheat, corn, and oat crops
And later those hands built fences
Laid claim to the land for their livelihood
For commerce by horse and buggy with a town
that required eggs, butter, milk, and meat
For the rest of our country that needed grains
For Native Indians who sought soap, corn
and canned turkey in exchange for chokecherries
and the wood that built those fences
Ellaraine Lockie’s recent poems won Oprelle Publishing’s Masters Contest and their Bigger Than Me Contest, Poetry Super Highway Contest, Nebraska Writers Guild’s Women of the Fur Trade Poetry Contest, and Musepaper's Monthly Poetry Contest. Ellaraine serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine LILIPOH.
MUSEPAPER POEM PRIZE #72
Lockie is a two-time Musepaper Poem Prize Winner!
Musepaper Poem Prize #38
("About the Birds and the Bees")
Musepaper Poem Prize #72
FEBRUARY 28, 2023 / MUSEPAPER POEM PRIZE #72 / "TELLING IT SLANT" © 2022 ELLARAINE LOCKIE