It's just poetry, it won't bite

Poverty


06.19.19 Posted in today's words by

Gale Acuff’s most recent poem to appear here was “Climbing” (August 2010).

Poverty
By Gale Acuff
If I can’t marry Miss Hooker one day
when I’m old enough then I won’t believe
in God anymore, she’s my Sunday School
teacher is Miss Hooker and too old for
me, 25 to my 10, and that makes
fifteen years older she is so Nature
being what it is, whatever it is,
I’ll have to wait a few years, until I’m
16 or 18 or 20 and she’s
older, too, and treat the short years we’ll live
together like Eternity, I mean
they’ll be long not in length but in how deep
and wide and when she’s 45 or so
to my 30 get ready to give her
 
up to Heaven, I mean that she’ll die and
leave me and our children and then I’ll kill
time until I die, too, and join her, if
I don’t go to Hell after all, sinning
is what I do best and I’m afraid that
I’ll only get better at it but if I rate
Heaven and see Miss Hooker again then
I’ll tell her how happy I am that we’re
both dead and alive forever, that’s
how it works for folks who go to our church,
anyway. But if I can’t marry her
after all then I’ll have to settle for
someone else, maybe only me. Poor thing.


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