A Circle of Pitchforks

by Bill Holm

A Poem about the farmers' protest against a powerline through Pope County, Minnesota.

I

They used to call it a sheriff's sale.
Had one over by Scandia in the middle of the '30s.
My dad told me how
the sheriff would ride out to the farm
to auction off the farmer's goods for the bank.
All the neighbors would come with pitchforks
and gather in the yard -
"What am I bid for this cow?"
3¢. 4¢. No more bids.
If a stranger came in and bid a nickel
a circle of pitchforks gathered around him
and the bidding stopped.
even in the grey light of memory
the windmill goes around uneasily.
The farmer's overalls
blow into the fork tines -
the striped overalls look like convict suits.
A smell of cowshit and wet hay seeps into everything.
The stranger wears tweed clothes
and a watch chain.
The sheriff's voice weakens
as he moves from hayrack to hayrack
holding up tools,
describing cattle and pigs
one at a time.

The space between those fork tines
is the air we all breathe.

II

"Resist much, obey little,"
Walt Whitman told us.
To bring light!
That's the thing!
Somewhere in North Dakota
lignite gouged out of the prairies
is transformed in to light.
But you are not in darkness, brothers,
for day to surprise you like a thief.
We are all sons of light,
sons of the day;
we are not of the night,
or of darkness.
Let us not sleep, as others do
but keep awake and be sober.
Those who sleep,
sleep at night,
and those who get drunk,
are drunk at night.

III

There is so much light in Minnesota.
The white faces brought here from Arctic Europe,
the lines of white birch in the white snow,
white ice like a skin over the water,
even the pale sun sees through snow fog.
White churches, white steeples, white gravestones.

Come into an old café
in Ghent, or Fertile, or Holloway.
The air is steamy with cigarette smoke and frozen breath.
Collars up under a sea of hats pulled down,
you can hardly see the mouths moving under them.
The talk is low, not much laughing.
Eat some hot dish, some jello,
and have a little coffee and pie.
These are the men wrecking the ship of state -
The carriers of darkness.

Up in the cities
the freeway lights burn all night.

IV

My grandfather came out of Iceland
Where he took orders from the Danes and starved.
After he died, I found his homestead paper
signed by Teddy Roosevelt,
the red wax still clear and bright.

In the corner, a little drawing of a rising sun
and a farmer plowing his way toward it.
A quarter section, free and clear.
On his farm he found arrowheads
every time he turned the soil.
Free and clear. Out of Iceland.
In the thirties, the farm was eaten by a bank
thrown back up when Olson
disobeyed the law that let them gorge.
In high school they teach
that Hubert Humphrey was a liberal
and Floyd Olsen was a highway.

V

Out on the power line barricades
the old farmers are afraid their cows'
teats will dry up after giving strange milk,
and their corn will hum in the granary all night.

They have no science, no words, no law,
no eminent domain
over this prairie full of arrowheads and flowers,
only they know it
and the state does not.

We homestead in our bodies too,
a few years, and then go back
in a circle
faster than the speed of light.

Source: Minnesota Writes: Poetry