PEARLS AND SWINE

Those Calgon cowboys in their
starched white shirts,
gold plated cufflinks,
eyes focused on the digital
tickertape scroll of the market board,
buy and sell the world
at forty dollars a share.

In steel and glass cathedrals,
the certified public priests of high finance
play pecuniary hymns
on computer keyboards
with their powder soft hands,
chanting aloud in solemn,
Harvard educated voices,
from the Wall Street Journal.

Somewhere in the Mid-west,
a farmer tosses hay from a wagon
with scarred, callused hands,
sweat stiffening his chambray shirt.
By dusk his back will feel
like it’s being squeezed in a vise.
The only stock which concerns him
are the pigs squealing
in his muddy field.

He has turned 200 acres of ground,
readying for Spring planting,
a crop that come harvest
might not be worth enough
to break even, if those
Calgon cowboys and priests
in their holy skyscrapers decide
the price of a bushel isn’t worth
the sweat off a man’s brow.


Published in Blue Collar Review, 2011