Railroad Crossing

[hack]

In the summer of my youth;

Saturday nights,
waiting for sleep on the back porch
distant accordions and guitars
accented with coyotl yelps

Migrant lettuce pickers
straightened
from days long stoops

crowded close

Only a little way from
the railroad tracks
that held them at bay

[MorpheusSandman]

There are few poets on here that can say as much in as few lines as you, hack. Your pieces seem to be consistently impressionistic and rather rich in their spareness which is always a wonderful trick to pull off. This is another good one.

[blank|verse]

Yeah, this is a wonderful little piece and deserves more comments than it has so far received. Reminded me of Of Mice and Men.

And even without an apostrophe, I love this phrase -

days long stoops
all stressed syllables, it just hangs in the mouth before hitching up its dungarees and shuffling off.

The last stanza strays a bit too close to prose, but I love the metaphor of the tracks holding the workers 'at bay'. (And do you mean 'coyotl yelps'?)

I think if you could work at this, or similar pieces in future, and really tidy them up, they would be even better. Every word counts in a short poem, and you've got the base material to work with in the excellent images and metaphors, it's just a case of working at it until everything is equally good.

[paperleaves]

holy hell. this is so incredible. something about the brevity of your words, how you can pack so many stories into so few stanzas is really, really a gift unmatched.

love
Kate

[Bar22do]

In the summer of my youth;

Saturday nights,
waiting for sleep on the back porch
distant accordions and guitars
accented with coyotl yelps

Migrant lettuce pickers straightened
from their days long stoops
crowded close

Only a little way from
the railroad tracks
that held them at bay

remarkable, beautiful... unique (or, your recurring uniqueness!:smile5:) - your words veiling such deep emotions... thanks for this one, hack...

[hack]

Thank you all. I blame Paper. I wrote it when I read "Barrio". She kicked me in the memory portion of the lining of my mind. Blank, I did wrestle with the punctuation, but I think it is the way I want it. "Coyotl" is the Uto-Aztecan root, and an homage to both the mixed ancestry of the migrant workers and the sounds that they made on a bare concrete slab with upright posts at the corners and strung with Xmas lights, as they danced and ate and played music until early Sunday morning while the coyotes howled and sang, and they were only drowned out by an occasional passing train...peace...