Poetry Sunday

If you think that's bad, how about this? ...

Coffee Cup Café

by Linda Hasselstrom

Soon as the morning chores are done,

cows milked, pigs fed, kids packed

off to school, it's down to the café

for more coffee and some soothing

conversation.

"If it don't rain pretty soon, I'm

just gonna dry up and blow away."

"Dry? This ain't dry. You don't know

how bad it can get. Why, in the Thirties

it didn't rain any more than this for

(breathless pause) six years."

"I heard Johnson's lost ninety head of calves

in that spring snowstorm. They

were calving and heading for home

at the same time and they just walked

away from them."

"Yeah and when the cows

got home, half of them died

of pneumonia."

"I ain't had any hay on me since that hail

last summer; wiped out my hay crop, all

my winter pasture, and then the drouth

this spring. Don't know what I'll do."

"Yeah, but this is nothing yet.

Why in the Thirties the grasshoppers came

like hail and left nothing green on the ground.

They ate fenceposts, even. And the dust, why

it was deep as last winter's snow drifts,

piled against the houses. It ain't bad here yet,

and when it does come, there won't be so many of us

having coffee."

So for an hour they cheer each other, each story

worse than the last, each face longer. You'd think

they'd throw themselves under their tractors

when they leave, but they're bouncy as a new calf,

caps tilted fiercely into the sun.

They feel better, now they know

somebody's having a harder time

and that men like them

can take it.

There's always someone having a worse day than you are, isn't there? And somehow, we all come through.

Have a good day and enjoy the rest of your weekend. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo