Fruit tramps (migrant fruit pickers) earned little money and the work was difficult. Through most of the decade of the 1940s, this was what my step-grandfather, Eli did, and Grandma and the children had to work with him in the fields...
Fruit Tramps
Aching over laden berry trays
At five or six he works us in the fields
We feel too well the weight of fear he wields
We sweat through throbbing sultry summer days
So many places, now I can't recall
In tents, in shacks, in seven schools one year
And Eli drags us all from there to here:
The fruit tramp follows where the harvests call
But in the evening, much too tired to play
I drift away and dream about the day
When we can leave these vagrant ways behind
And Mama has a husband who is kind
'Til suddenly a rooster greets the dawn
Another town, another dream is gone
YOU ARE READING
Poems About my Grandma
PoetryWhat a life! What a woman! She was born in Montana in 1910. Her mother had mental problems and she was taken in by a Canadian family in 1913. She spent the next thirteen years on the Saskatchewan prairies. At 16, she was forced to return to her bi...
