Woman with a Hoe

If you tickle the earth with a hoe, she laughs with a harvest.--Douglas Jerrold

In the 19th century, a painting by John Everett Millais entitled "Man With a Hoe" inspired poet Edwin Markham to write one of his most popular poems.  Also titled "Man With a Hoe", this poem acknowledges the burdens of the common laborer.  The first four lines indicate the misery of his lot:
          Bowed by the weight of the centuries he leans
          Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
          The emptiness of ages in his face,
          And on his back the burden of the world . . .



Man With a Hoe--John Everett Millais
http://bloodyparadise.wordpress.com/the-hoe-in-art-and-history/





If I were a visual artist, I would create a drawing of someone I vaguely remember from my childhood:  a woman with a hoe.  If her name was ever known to me, it is gone from my memory, and also gone are the people I should have asked.  I know nothing of her life, her family, her story.  I simply remember seeing her more than once in two very specific locations:  her garden and the church.  In both places I noticed her babushka-covered head bowed as she murmured words I couldn't understand.

All I know is something my mother told me, that the woman in the babushka went to church every morning, where she mumbled her prayers in German, her first language.  The words she mumbled in her garden, however, were not prayers, but German curses as she called upon God himself to damn the tenacious weeds.  Did her hoeing "tickle the earth?"  I don't know, but I have a feeling that Earth or God or the cosmos did smile a little at the delightful irony of her piety in the morning and profanity in the afternoon. 

I am not a poet laureate like Edwin Markham was, but I have written my own tribute to this immigrant woman with a hoe from long ago:

          Cultivation
          The woman in the black babushka
          kneels in church each morning,
          mouthing fervent devotions, 
          prayers for rain and forgiveness
          and just one more day in her garden,
          where she wields her hoe
          like a battleaxe.
          "Du Gottverdammtes Ding!" she curses,
          hacking at roots that bind and twist
          all the way back to the old country.

I hope she reaped a bountiful harvest.