had some pretty bad news.
One quarter of the wheat is lost:
blown away or withered up.
What remains is little more than
a wisp of what it should be.
And every day we have no rain,
more wheat dies.
County Agent Dewey says, “Soon
there won’t be enough wheat
for seed to plant next fall.”
The piano is some comfort in all this.
I go to it and I forget the dust for hours,
testing my long fingers on wild rhythms,
but Ma slams around in the kitchen when I play
and after a while she sends me to the store.
Joe De La Flor doesn’t see me pass him by;
he rides his fences, dazed by dust.
I wince at the sight of his rib-thin cattle.
But he’s not even seeing them.
I look at Joe and know our future is drying up
and blowing away with the dust.
April 1934