Edward Dorn: Goodbye to the Illinois

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Rural road, Saline County, Illinois: photo by Arthur Rothstein, January 1939

Where out of the black dirt
screens are put up, shocks
men come blindly to harvest
and eat large meals in the larger houses
and the rest of the year you sit in a small house not knowing
how many rooms you want, not guessing
how many there are
of heat giving rise to plants of illusion
soft winds blowing yellow pollen across the rows
and in seclusion babies are born
in spring, where oh but in winter
the black vanes of elders everywhere
or walnut along the river break the sky
a meaningless map, a meaningless riddle
of what in simpler life would say was lost
in space, rising as debris in tornadoes,
but were really chaffs
of hay in July, oh mother
I remember your year-long stare
across plowed flat prairielands.

Farm, Illinois: photo by Russell Lee, January 1937



Farmland, Illinois: photo by Russell Lee, January 1937



Mrs. Fred Morgenflash and the youngest of her six children. Morgenflash rents fifty-one acres from a private party. Near Marseille, Illinois: photo by Russell Lee, January 1937



Backyard and porch of Fred Morgenflash's farmhouse near Marseille, Ilinois: photo by Russell Lee, January 1937



Abandoned farm house on George Erickson's one hundred twenty acre farm near Seneca, Illinois. The land is being farmed by the owner: photo by Russell Lee, January 1937



Pump and barn on George Erickson's farm near Seneca, Illinois. This one hundred twenty acre farm is farmed for the land. No one lives in the house: photo by Russell Lee, January 1937



Farm, Williamson County, Illinois: photo by Russell Lee, January 1937

Illinois farm landscape along the tracks of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad en route to Chilicothe, Illinois: photo by Jack Delano, March 1943

Edward Dorn: from Three Farm Poems, in The Newly Fallen, 1961

All photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress