Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE HARVEST FLY'S COMPLAINT, by HARRY HIBBARD KEMP


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE HARVEST FLY'S COMPLAINT, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: When the sun stares hot, unsparing like / a lidless golden eye
Last Line: Though I know that I am in for being done as heretofore!
Subject(s): Harvest; Wandering & Wanderers; Wanderlust; Vagabonds; Tramps; Hoboes


WHEN the sun stares hot, unsparing, like a lidless golden eye,
I labor, dusty, sweating,—whom they call the harvest fly.
The header-box runs up and down and fills with slippery wheat.
I leap about and ply the fork, all arms and hands, and feet.
I'm up before the dawn, nor rest before the moon rides high—
And they couldn't do without me, tho' they call me harvest fly.

The farmers and the papers send out lying calls for me:
Where they say they need a hundred they have work for two or three.
Then I flit in, brown and mothlike, and forgather with my kind
In some little town far Westward open to each prairie wind:
And the farmers come to hire me; but by that time park and street
Teem with hundreds who have listened to the siren call of Wheat,—
So they beat me down in wages, give as little as they can,
And if I get indignant they go hire another man.

But the harvest doesn't last for long—the stubble bristles brown,
The wheat's all cut and stacked, and then I hike on back to town,
And try to catch a freight and leave, but find they've closed down tight
On letting hoboes beat their way, and jug them left and right.
They were glad enough to get me here, but, now the work is done,
The Law must steal what I have earned beneath the broiling sun,
The Court must have its share in fines (I tell a common tale),
And they haul me off for vagrancy and clap me into jail.

And, Pard, I'm getting sick of it—the way they treat us men,
And, sometimes, I make up my mind I won't go back again—
But then I get a vision of those rolling miles of grain,
Of the lines of marching trees that make a wind-break on the plain,
And I'm off before I know it, peering from a boxcar door:
Though I know that I am in for being done as heretofore!





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