THE VALUE OF WORK

 

​​​

​​​

In Missouri cornflowers sprout

heady in ditches and backyards, 

turning September lavish, wild 

with lavender-blue chards 

of earthed dusk. As the youngest,

my mother was sent out by Grandma

to pick it, getting her out from underfoot 

while the nine older children 

canned tomatoes, sweet peaches, beans.

She said the long fields were so blue

she sometimes thought she was at sea, 

wading among the thistle, lavender 

powdering what was left of the late corn.

She’d come home hours later,

after all the work was done,

sometimes without even one flower,

her pockets full of chestnuts,

her hems stained and grass-damp—

disheveled and pinkened, her sisters teased,

like she met a boy in the just-fallen leaves.

But she’d met no boy out there, 

just her own blue mind and before the long 

windless days of drought in the seventies 

passed she was gone. When I asked how

she could leave those hills and hollows

she said she learned the value of work

by not doing it and then she was ruined.

When we go back, we visit Grandma at her grave—

a hill swarming with cornflowers, blue and bluer each year. 

And if she once watched her child from the window 

and wondered—her chapped hands red and stinging 

from a sink full of skinned tomatoes—if that girl

was ruined or saved, I’ll never know.

​​​​​​

​​​​​

​​​​​

​​​​​​​​

​​​

 

BIO:

​

​Sara Wallace is the author of The Rival (University of Utah Press). Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Agni, Hanging Loose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, Yale Review and others.  As a neurodivergent person with low-frequency hearing loss, she enjoys advocating for people with disabilities in her teaching when possible. She currently teaches at New York University and lives in Queens. 

​

​

 

​

​