Poetry Friday--"Almost"

This may be the last poem in my Sketchbook Project series. I hope I have captured the voices of those children who, in the first two decades of the 20th century, were forced by circumstance to work at an age when they should have been playing or attending school.

We take too much for granted nowadays, including child labor and workplace safety laws. Not to get political, but, there are some people who think the government should be limited in its oversight of business and labor. If a country without governmental regulation were to evolve, how long do you think it would take before children were back at work in the factories, fields, tenements, or on the street? (In case anyone has forgotten, in the debates leading up to the 2012 presidential election, there was one candidate who thought children should/could replace janitors in schools.)

Caption: A "Reader" in cigar factory, Tampa, Fla. He reads books and newspapers at top of his voice all day long. This is all the education many of these workers receive. He is paid by them and they select what he shall read. Location: Tampa, Florida. Date: January 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

Almost

We have a man
here who reads
to us all day long.

It's almost like being
in school, or maybe
like being in a show.

It's mostly the news:
murder, shipwrecks,
investigations, fraud,

disappearances, crop
failure, bankruptcy,
scandals, disaster,

train wrecks, jail
breaks, disease...
It's almost like being

out in the real world
except sometimes
here we get poetry.

© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

I have been using my imagination to fill in the stories untold by Hine's photographs, there's a man in Massachusetts who has been piecing together the stories in another way. Click here for a short video.

The Poem Farm is where you should head for this week's Round-Up.