Jars

jars,

seven-hundred and
sixty-eight of them,

quart-size,

regular mouth,

about six-hundred and
forty dollars worth total,

eighty-three cents per jar
give or take,

why are they waiting
by the register?

not really sure,

maybe somebody is going
to a Greg Brown concert
and will hand out jars
with stewed tomatoes
or sliced peaches
preserved under a
gel seal and an
air-tightened lid
as a token of
appreciation via
the price of
admission,

but it was
more than
unexpected
when a short man
probably from in
or around
Rio Grande country
bought the jars
for a rather
massive operation,

one that involves
hives and things
that go sting
when a smoke source
is not nearby,

and in this moment,
one appreciates merit-
based discrimination
over racial profiling,

a second man of inadequate
intelligence and talent failed
to finish the loading of the jars
into the first man's pick-up bed,

thereby failing to serve
the customer thoroughly,

so the poet in question
loaded the remaining
twenty-nine cases with the
assistance of a pallet jack
and two other men of the
some extraction as the
first man,

if anything this poet learned
firsthand this day,

it's that skin color should never
inform one's opinion about any
human being's individual worth,

and these three men lived and died
by the bees,

and they had constitutions as sweet
and kind as the product that would
be packaged soon enough in the jars,

sweet and golden that is,

and if anything else can be gained
from this is that the work ethic is
a human trait,

not just an American one,

who would have thought ruminating
about quart-size jars would be so poetically
symbolic and thought-provoking?

Reviews

[TLK]

Heh. This poem is a real trip into various realms of human experience. The vagaries of commerce has provided a spur to the imagination, personal economic gain has led to answering that question, and out of this mix comes a tale of appreciating the bee-like business of people who are different. It's quite amazing how all this comes together.

"things
that go sting" is very arresting.

Finally, I wonder what prompts you to say that "work ethic is / a human trait". Perhaps there really are people around you that still bang on about America being the home of some kind of dream unique to its borders, home to some kind of clear-eyed pioneer vision for profiteering. Even though that's absurd -- in a world where the World Economy is no longer totally in American hands, when innovation has died out of most major American companies to be replaced by play-it-safe bureaucracy (and you could argue that Apple's success is no 100% Apple-pie American, because of Jonathan Ive... but I'm not nerd enough to care about Apple so that's just a supposition) -- I'm sure some people still say it. We all need air to breathe, and it seems that lies just makes that air sweeter.

I really felt that I knew you through this poem, and by extension these wonderful people you worked with.

[Kenneth The Poet]

Thank you so much for this, I deeply appreciate it. I jockey a register on the weekend at a large box store and I had a Hispanic man pay for jars that would store processed honey. It is a sizable industry in my part of the USA. I had asked a worker with skin color to help the man to load up the jars as it was a busy shopping weekend. That worker only did a partial job, and as I was leaving for the night, I noticed the job wasn't finished so I helped the customer load up all those jars. The man had two other guys with him and we got the rest of job done. Three Hispanic men had a greater work ethic than a worker with my skin color and it finally dawned on me how invalid racist preconceptions are. These three men made their daily bread off the honey the bees produced, and they were kind and nice and not angry about how they were treated by the other worker. Hence, they were sweet and golden like honey.