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Tim Hunt

Saying Grace

(Explore more of Hunt’s work in his new poetry pamphlet The Fiddler, available now from Buttonhook Press. Click on the highlighted title to follow the link.)

Resettled farm child from Taos Junction to Bosque Farms project (New Mexico) by Dorothea Lange

In the past as you were taught to know it,
it is always the 1930s: The Depression.
The time of getting by:
when saying grace as the day finished turning dark
wasn’t a form,

because food on the table was a blessing
to be counted.

But this past was their past—
and in it, hardship an Eden
carried on into this world
where necessity
is no longer the order of things.

And so, in your past theirs is a kind of fable
that you want to mean something,
because then there would be an order to things

and you, too, could sit at the table
saying grace as if food were a blessing,

and the place that was
would be this place.

 

About the writer:
Tim Hunt’s collections include Voice to Voice in the Dark (Broadstone Books), Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes (winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), The Tao of Twang and Poem’s Poems & Other Poems (both CW Books), and Fault Lines (The Backwaters Press). Hunt’s recognitions include The Chester H. Jones National Poetry Prize. Originally from the hill country of northern California, he was educated at Cornell University. His final teaching post was Illinois State University where he was University Professor. Tim Hunt and his wife Susan live in Normal, Illinois, which is not hill country. Explore more of Hunt’s work in his new poetry pamphlet The Fiddler, available now from Buttonhook Press. Click on the highlighted title to follow the link.

Image: Resettled farm child from Taos Junction to Bosque Farms project (New Mexico) by Dorothea Lange (1895-1965). Fine art photograph. [This is a colorized version of the original black-and-white image. The color palette is speculative.] No technical information specified. December 1935. Public domain.

OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation supporting writers and artists worldwide.

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Americana creative writing Dorothea Lange literary arts lyric poetry narrative poetry New Mexico poetry poetry: all forms & styles Resettled farm child from Taos Junction to Bosque Farms project Saying Grace Tim Hunt