Dust in the Wind - Ed Coletti

[Larry Robinson]

Dust in the Wind 
 Recalled During Times of Covid 19 

(with gratitude to Ken Burns)


To Amarillo came the initial
two-mile-high wave of dust
choking first the roosters
followed by the hens,
cows, swine, and humans.
Then it buried Oklahoma,

Its no-man’s-land above Texas’
panhandle suffocating shriveling.
Where were the rain clouds in ’32?
nothing whatsoever grew
“what didn’t grow we tried harder
to grow, no crop new, just more.” 

(collapsing demand for so much
too-abundant over-fertile crop
blonde and auburn very sexy)

First, radios electric haywired,
you couldn’t shake hands at all
just before the dusters came
and all the little kids were freed
from school same as in the North
during the big snow storms up there.

Here on the plains just dust after
the buffalo grass was plowed under,
the water dried up, and the rain
stopped coming where there’d been 
boom times of high golden wheat, 
great big homes with telephones!

	
(collapsing demand for so much
too-abundant over-fertile crop
blonde and auburn very sexy)

Wheat went down to seventeen cent,
and “we seen droughts before, and
things’ll get better next year,” and
Roosevelt preached loudly “no fear”
while this ram of dust charged and
charged again and more than once again.

You were breathing in  the black
blizzards, but, in between storms,
it couldn’t be more blue and beautiful,
the irony surrounding destructive force,
for the land had been swept clean of
its topsoil and an explosion of jackrabbits

(blonde and auburn very sexy)

Jackrabbits everywhere like lost soil moving,
and the screaming of rabbit, the jackrabbits
being clubbed by men, women and kids screaming.
Rabbits were replaced by ton on ton
upon ton of strangling black dust, 
a third of the land was blowing.

Most of the starving cattle shot,
humans dispossessed and foreclosed.
Suicides landed like buzzards on families
until the Black Blizzard of 1934
rendered suicide mostly irrelevant.
Black so black “black’s” very essence.

Even fearless FDR feared
a new man-made sahara
no longer the good earth
this desert produced nomads
seekers after light and fruit.

(collapsed demand for so much
too-abundant over-fertile crop
blonde and auburn very sexy)  
				

Black Sunday 1935 portended
further years of drought and of
depression, depression and
drought little doubt they would remain
as with the rain which never left 
the clouds, they vowed not to leave
their homes, such as they were, only
movement here being four million 
acres shifting, sliding, blowing.
Little girls in flour sack without
a piece of bread, daddy’s too proud
to take charity or seek a loan.

California no dust and the sun
no black wind or dust pneumonia.
3 out of 4 stoically remain behind
leave others to the migration,
defeat and shame carrying dust
by the lungful into Needles,
San Berdoo, Oakland, Merced,
picking oranges, prunes, grapes
when they could and all the while
hacking up remnants of the plains.

I’d thought they all had left,
that Oklahoma was no more,
Arkansas a wasteland,
the  Panhandle holding nothing,
that California held all surviving.
But Roosevelt made Democrats of
the plains while the dispossessed
in California became the Okies, and
“Okie go back, we don’t want you!”
the sign of those California times.

Back home, 1937 in the Dust Bowl,
the worst followed a snow storm,
dust increasing four days straight,
tidal waves of dust devouring towns.
What is worse, the dirt or the water?

				
Then government paid farmers
not to grow their crops,
erosion cut in half, but
the rains came and so did
the grasshoppers like a moving earth.
more rain and the snow,
better farming, less erosion,
and sunflowers lit the land again.
and the wheat outgrew the children,
what rain!  what good rain!
what good nourishing rain!
what a wonderful wheat crop!

(blonde and auburn very sexy)

The speculators returned;
they planted malignant seeds
for later dust storms carrying
once again in ‘51 the lesson, 
“Listen to the land and not to us!”

	- Ed Coletti

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