One of the men lifted his head
and looked at me
as we sloped past the ash fields,
and rows of toilers
like grey bamboo canes
if bamboo was stooped and bent
with brittle hands knuckle white
against the plastic handled hoes.
Her hands, smaller, firmer, sure,
came down on my shoulders
shadowed his face with fear.
An explanation in a classroom
pretending it isn’t an excuse
claims to be progress,
claims to be a new world
built on the broken bones
of the last.
Mothers scream during childbirth.
There is blood and pain
and sometimes
death.
We are lucky we are not all toiling.
If the old world had their way
who knows what would have happened?
We are smarter these days
we can laugh at the facts
that shattered when the world changed.
Who know what will happen
at the next night rise.
Carol J Forrester 
Maybe we need to be ready to toil once again…
As Zorba said, “Life is trouble, only death is not.” There are a privileged few who can skate, but most of us need to keep our sleeves rolled up.
There is a consistency to life and some things, particularly human nature, change very little. Not all mothers scream in childbirth. For some it is a beautiful and spiritual experience. But in recent times both television and media seem incapable of depicting pregnancy without vomiting – I never vomited – or labour without screaming. did not scream either. 🙂
The description of the toilers in the first stanza is stark and oh so clear, Carol, and I felt a pang of guilt when I read the lines:
‘An explanation in a classroom
pretending it isn’t an excuse
claims to be progress,
claims to be a new world
built on the broken bones
of the last.’
I like the cynicism in:
‘We are smarter these days
we can laugh at the facts
that shattered when the world changed.’
Good observation in these lines: “An explanation in a classroom
pretending it isn’t an excuse
claims to be progress”