byJim Barnes
- Kid, they told me, those raucous neighbor boys,
you won't find nothing down in them bottoms
worth a shit. I showed them nothing but thumbs
and fingers waving ears. I knew what poise
to take and still avoid their wrath. The joy
of finding arrowheads beneath the crumb-
ling leaves was something I could never come
to trade for any neighbor's game. No toy
could ever do what flint or milky chert
could do for my own small mauled imagination.
For seven years I sifted coal-black dirt,
found arrowheads so keen I knew I'd seen
into my own ancestral past where hurt
and harm stood taller than neighbor boys had been.
From The Sawdust War. Copyright 1992 by Jim Barnes.
Used with the permission of the poet and the University of Illinois Press.Return to the Jim Barnes website