On Strike Till 3

On a freezing Christmas Eve, a widow and her young son David huddle in their cottage, their poverty as stark as the winter landscape outside. The mother has worked herself to exhaustion, her body breaking from labor that barely keeps them fed. When illness forces her to seek treatment far from home, David is left alone with his love and his fear. A boy who has only heard grownups speak of workers withholding their hands until the masters listen, David decides to strike himself from school, from play, from everything until his mother comes home. He believes, with the terrible certainty of childhood, that if he just refuses to move, the universe will grant his wish. This is a narrative poem that measures the distance between a childs faith and the cold machinery of poverty and illness. It captures the early twentieth-century struggle of workers who gave everything and received so little, filtered through one boys desperate, beautiful hope.