The Great
Strength
by Jim
Heynen
This is Michael Carey for Voices
on the Prairie a weekly sampling from the rich soil of Iowa’s literary
tradition. Today’s poet is Jim Heynen who grew up on a farm outside Sioux
Center in northwest Iowa. He maintains along with a couple dozen other poets
I know that his was the last county in the state to get electricity. Whether
one can believe him on that matter or not one should believe him on the matter
of his wonderful poem The Great Strength, when he talks about how true
strength and grace is often hidden where one least expects it, sometimes even
inside ourselves, and how it takes a special attention to the small things in
life to notice.
The Great Strength
Those who bulged from their shirts
like straw from tightly tied bales,
who won fist fights at the fair,
caught the greased pig, wrestled a steer,
were strong men of the plains.
But the great strength was private,
known only to farmers
who could see the power
hidden in the face of a peddler
or farmhand, in the strangely shaped body,
pinched shoulders and spreading hips,
bent over like hybrid grain in the wind.
When the fields had been cleared,
when the last hay was stacked,
the last fence fixed,
when the cellar was sealed for winter,
always, there was the accident,
and he would be there
with jackknife or pliers or bare hands,
his strength coming out
from all its secret parts.
For a moment we knew:
a wagon set upright,
a hand pulled free from moving gears.
It was all in the wrists, or the legs,
or the eyes. Afterwards
there was no excitement at all,
and only a few saw him fade back into his body.
"The Great Strength"
by Jim Heynen originally appeared in The Man Who Kept Cigars In His Cap
published by Graywolf Press.
For Voices from the Prairie and Humanities Iowa, this is Michael Carey hoping you continue to hear the music blooming all around you.
Biography
Jim Heynen was born and raised on a farm outside Sioux Center, Iowa "in the last county in the state to get electricity" and is the author of three collections of short stories/prose poems, The Man Who Kept Cigars in His Cap (Graywolf, 1979), You Know What Is Right (North Point Press, 1985) and The One Room Schoolhouse (Alfred Knopf, 1993); and several collections of poetry, including A Suitable Church (Copper Canyon, 1981). He lives now in St. Paul, Minnesota.