Dorothea Lange Poem by Allen Braden

For her it all began on the streets of San Francisco
where The White Angel was doling out slabs of bread,
mugs of coffee and pearl barley stew. Each man's
desperation struck her dumb with inspiration.

The studio paled at once, the light neutralized.
She could not stand it anymore, this posing
of the wealthy, this fussing over the exact placement
for a sleeve, adding a youthful gleam to their eyes,

not when she could sense the world grating upon its axis.
Perhaps it was childhood polio that allowed her to walk
unnoticed the identical, seemingly hopeless boulevards
where the unlucky sold pencils out of tin cups

or bushels of apples buffed individually with care
to catch the light in a way any artist would cherish.
She sojourned in the tent cities of San Joaquin
for the bereft imagery that creased a woman's face,

cataloging the hundreds of pairs of hands and feet
sunburnt and scalded with each day of field labor.
She was only an invisible girl from Hoboken
but in the Shenandoah Valley during oat harvest,

with Georgia's pickers of peaches and tobacco
or among the lives interned in California, 1942,
she was a student of the desolation around her,
how it can be endured, how it must be survived.