A golden shovel using Langston Hughes’ “Tired”
I am in trouble now and it’s not just me. I
sweep the porch clean of thin leaves, am
humbled by their delicate folding in, so
muted and saintly their colors. I am now tired
indefinitely. There are others of
this same ailment or another, waiting.
It is hard to have patience with us, we aren’t
likable in our idleness. Maybe you
hate us for our ease of life, for
it seems on the outside untroubled, long days, the
only task driving to the grocery store and back, a world
between the sofa and TV, joyless acreage. To
others who have lost nothing, we become
someone to crave revenge on, to slap the good
into, because surely we have none, no good and
no effort and no struggle and still beautiful
somehow, while time ravines your own face, time and
hardship. You don’t mean to be cruel, you are kind
to those that deserve kindness, but we don’t deserve it. Let
the snow fall upon our bare heads, let the rain soak us.
You’ve chosen your champions to destroy us, to take
what little we have after our health has deserted us, like a
friend who’s a friend because you have a car to drive her in, a knife
always hidden. This friend hates you for your car, and
will not hesitate to ruin it and you, to cut
as many friends and lovers away from you as possible. The
world is like this, yes, I am hated for a check, and the world
does not consider me worth study, worth a cure, in
fact I am only worth abandonment. Two
crass billionaires hold my future in their hands, and
you put them there, father, aunt, cousin, can you see?
Will you care for me when what I have is taken, what
I don’t have mistaken. What I have is worms
waiting for me, they know my body is not well. Are
you hearing the yellowjackets humming in my yard, eating
the decaying apples, their sweet stink, their brown stains
last, do you see the ground the apples melt into? I am the
the apple, and holding me together is a small mercy, disability, my rind.
–
Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), and Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, JMWW, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Rattle, Solstice, Sweet Tree Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in MacArthur, West Virginia.
