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Column 056

At the Edge of Town

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.26.2006

When I com­plained about some of the tedious jobs I had as a boy, my moth­er would tell me, Ted, all work is hon­or­able. In this poem, Don Welch gives us a man who’s been fix­ing barbed wire fences all his life.

At the Edge of Town

Hard to know which is more gnarled,
the posts he hammers staples into
or the blue hummocks which run
across his hands like molehills.

Work has reduced his wrists
to bones, cut out of him
the easy flesh and brought him
down to this, the crowbar’s teeth

caught just behind a barb.
Again this morning
the crowbar’s neck will make
its blue slip into wood,

there will be that moment
when too much strength
will cause the wire to break.
But even at 70, he says,

he has to have it right,
and more than right.
This morning, in the pewter light,
he has the scars to prove it.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. From Gutter Flowers, Logan House, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Don Welch and reprinted by permission of Logan House and the author. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.

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