by Jianqing Zheng
—Dorothea Lange’s Filipinos Cutting Lettuce, Salina, California, June 1935
While the burning sun
snaps its long fire whips
like a grim foreman
sitting astride a horse,
the farmhands bend
their bodies and cut
lettuce row after row.
They cut the sun,
blood-faced, to howl
and fall in pain,
cut evening up
with stars fading in,
and cut weariness
into tomorrow’s dream.
Jianqing Zheng is author of A Way of Looking, a haibun collection which won the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press, and The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville Publishing, 2023), editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia and seven other scholarly books, and professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University.
Hawaii Pacific Review 