These are 10 lines left over from a three-page poem
about working on tobacco farms, and has
nothing to do with working on tobacco farms.
But it picks up somewhere.
It's called "The Museum of Work."
It's about boots, a pair of boots.
"The Museum of Work"--
black high-top leather boots, as new as when a Polish soldier
broke them in September 1939, running toward a German tank,
then wised up and ran back home and hid them
under the chicken coop.
His son wore them across the ocean.
They walked him to school.
They pushed the pedal of a big dump truck.
And in those boots, he bought three more, then sat
for 40 years in a cramped office like an American,
doing the numbers that made the money,
we call the great American success story.
A pair of boots humiliated in war
and redeemed by work, now on display in the Museum of Work
next to the ladders."