The Heedless Shepherd
Grief is a family going down one by one
Wild buffalo tread on thin medallions
It’s a sin to be born poor
It’s treason to stay that way
On the way to work at Fort Hood
Shepherd fell in love with a cherry
Mother wore a red gingham apron
While plating macaroni on the base
At home her daughter sat under an eye
That lost her in a blind spot
Back then work had a weight you could feel it
After the war the father got a son
Quilts are folded like flags in the cupboard
The morning shepherd left
We drained a pitcher of cheap wine
Our ancestors had robbed and been robbed
And now everything was a mess
Copyright © 2022 by Monica McClure. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 2, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“A friend had given me the book What Work Is by Philip Levine, and as I read it, I began thinking about the legacies of farming and sharecropping on both sides of my family, and how, even though I have both the colonized and the colonizer in my lineage, my ancestors had poverty in common. I was pregnant, living in the mountains, and feeling drawn to pastoral themes. When I wrote this poem, I hoped to complicate the bucolic image of the content shepherd, which the bourgeois classes had glorified, and show the work and banal humanity of it.”
—Monica McClure
Monica McClure
Monica McClure is a Chicana poet and the author. She works as a copywriter and currently lives in Brooklyn.