Dustbowl Breakdown

I got wed in twenty-two.

Took this place with mortgage, new.

 

Built a fence around my land,

plowed that grass with my own bare hands.

 

Planted collards, corn and beans.

Prettiest spread you ever seen.

 

Rain don’t come, it leaves you dry,

Underneath that big old sky.

 

Got no river, ain’t no rain,

lonely here on the great dry plain.

 

Nature’s older, bigger’n me.

You can’t cheat her, no sirree.

 

Twenty acres turned to dust,

my new tractor, gathering rust.

 

Wind blew down from Cimarron there,

big black dirt all in the air.

 

Ain’t no beans or collards now,

ain’t no nothing left to plow.

 

Heading out for Monterrey,

nothing here to make us stay.

 

Windmill, tractor, homestead, plow:

wind and dust can have ‘em now.

 

Author's Note

In the 1920s and 30s the US government encouraged people in the MidWestern states to settle the land by taking out mortgages on dirt farms. Over-exploitation of the land, accompanied by several years of drought, brought disaster. The fertile topsoil simply blew away in dust storms, rendering the farms useless. As related in Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", many farming families headed for California, to try to scrape an existence picking fruit.

I have tried to make the poem sound like a traditional country song ("breakdown" is a genre of old country music, as well as having its more common meaning here).