Bad Poetry: Scab

For the Poets & Storytellers United, a  poem about scabs. A scab is a crust of dried body fluids over a wound, or a strike-breaking worker.

A strike was meant to be a blow

if only wounding profit.

If workers thought job paid too low

they simply would walk off it,

and this was felt as "bleeding" labor,

money, all away,

and bosses tried to hire a neighbor

to fill in that day.

And so this man was called a scab.

It wasn't meant to injure,

until the striking laborers' gab

added gall and ginger.

A skilled coal miner's pay was low; 

work, dangerous and hard.

How far below could wages go

on a day labor yard?

So scabs could easily be despised

as lowest of the low

though, when disasters traumatized,

to scabbing men would go.

Those times are gone to come no more

and who would call them back?

So Hollywood said "Mining lore

a scab's viewpoint doth lack."

And someone wrote an eighties movie

simply called The River

and said "Mel Gibson's young and groovy!

He'll make girls' hearts quiver,

and for the boys, bring Spacek in,

and show them having sex

(from shoulders up) with sweaty skin

in scabs' grim little shacks."

Mel Gibson played a noble-hearted

man who saved his farm

by scabbing; Sissy'd not be parted

from him, but risked harm

and left the kids behind to meet him

in his pine board shanty.

From that day on, reviewers treat them

as poison, not eye candy.

Gibson's his own producer now.

Spacek's career was charred.

Bygones are bygones, you'd avow,

but bitterness dies hard.

(The River (1984) is currently available to watch online--for a fee. 

In 1983 the producers looked for a real Tennessee town that looked weatherbeaten but not hopeless. The farm scenes that ended up in the movie were shot in Tennessee. For the town, people said "They wanted Clinchport; too bad they didn't come out before the flood." Gate City wanted to be used as the scene of the movie--though we don't actually have a river. The producers didn't think my town looked weatherbeaten enough but finally agreed that a short stretch of a back street could be made to look down-at-heel when wet. So you can see an unflattering view of part of my town, with some real local people in the crowd, in the scene where Mel Gibson goes to the bank after the flood. 

We never were a mining town. People I knew liked The River and Gibson and Spacek and the whole foofarah of having a film crew in town. Those who remember 1983 still do. 

People who belong to unions, e.g. the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes, haaaated the movie and have never forgiven those who made it.

I'd never claim that it was a great movie, no suspense, no comedy, not even a car chase, strictly a reenactment of some long-gone scab's apologia, but what pretty scenery it has!)