artwork: ralph murre
Harvesting Pumpkins
by Donal Mahoney
From villages in Iowa
and from towns in the Dakotas ,
there stream to Chicago
parades of lithe girls
looking for boys
who will look at them
but who find instead
the men who will wine them
through summer,
who will wait until fall
to thresh in the fields
one summer can ripen,
the men who will watch
till a pumpkin falls from the vine.
This is the courtship
village girls dream about,
laugh about, hope for.
Come fall, these are the men
who fill silos of girls
from Elkhart and Davenport
Ely and other small places,
lithe girls who in spring
come to Chicago
who will look at them
but who find instead
the reapers, the men.
~ first published in The Kansas Quarterly
