New year, new poems on the sofa

Maybe I've always wanted to be a novelist.

Years ago, I read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It's a famous book. It won a Pulitzer. But it left me wanting more, wanting to hear more, know more, feel more about the lives of the people Mr. Agee and Mr. Evans were in the South to meet.

One day, sitting on the bus, I thought that maybe I should try to write the story that I wanted to read. I dug into some websites, looked at a lot of photographs, read some accounts, and wrote.

I've never been a sharecropper, and I wasn't even born yet in the 1930s. But here are some poems that, I hope, tell a story.