Our Food In Your Hands Poem by George Wallace

How can a man walk thru a supermarket anywhere
in America without feeling the imprint of your hands
on everything he touches -hands strung in the dawn
of cinch bug nematodes smell of dung -plastic buckets
bandanas & shorthandled tools -hands which dream
of beanfields straw beds & barbed wire -cornsilk &
buttermilk -the watery music which leaps like fish
out of blue mestizo night

You migrate thru South Carolina like drift of fog you harvest
tomatoes in Florida you migrate thru Delaware Maryland
Connecticut & Maine you harvest potatoes apples soybeans
peas beets -spinach & beets -you tend to broilers heifers
hens & sows -you harvest wild rice you pick avocados &
grapes you plant white tufts of cloud into the hair of your
children like seeds in heaven

O lettuce! O bold Salinas valley! -O crates of California!
Plums apricots Oregon cherries in plastic bags -in low
country & on the high mountaintops cucumbers string beans
brussel sprouts walnuts peaches & almonds -oysters in
their shells -broadcast spreaders sprinkler pipes & burlap
sacks -how can any man woman or child in Colorado Alabama
Arkansas Missouri Louisiana or Illinois -any man woman
or child in Cochise County Arizona or New York City

ever walk through an American supermarket without feeling
the power of your steady eyes -balancing every crop &
planted field in America against the remaining hours of day -
your back your neck your feet your shoulders & especially
your hands -whole families of hands - tired cut bruised
bug-bit hard with work -unwitnessed underpaid ripped off
& oh yes ready to take being kicked out

Because you come back, don't you, you always come back -
you burn thru mist like the border sun which migrates
thru every supermarket in America