Urban Pastoral Scene (mid-1940s)

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A child of white migrant in her playhouse. The rusted scales represented a clock to the little girl. Near Harlingen, Texas: photo by Russell Lee, February 1939 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection)

In time we find three children, two pleasant girls,
one dumb boy, enjoying modest picnic mid junk
strewn vacant lot in life's brief eclogue of
passage through ambient mixed creation.
In the photo torn from the old album
the blank kid in the middle's me, sucking on
some milk, while the two girls -- script verso
in some anonymous ancient hand
identifies them as Jane and Suellen,
grimy cherubic charmers, imperfectly
recalled, fair, brown-haired, freckled secret
sharers of archaic lunch time -- munch huge
sandwiches that dwarf the tiny fists which
hungrily clutch them, much as life's to be clutched,
as though a whole world were there to be eaten.

A child of white migrant in her playhouse. Near Harlingen, Texas: photo by Russell Lee, February 1939 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection)



A child of white migrant. Near Harlingen, Texas: photo by Russell Lee, February 1939 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection)



Small girls sitting in doorway of house in Georgetown, Washington, D.C.: photo by Carl Mydans for US Resettlement Administration, September 1935 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection)