Warren Pryor
by Alden Nowlan
When every pencil meant a sacrifice
his parents boarded him at a school in town,
slaving to free him from the stony fields,
the meagre acreage that bore them down.
They blushed with pride when, at his graduation,
they watched him picking up the slender scroll,
his passport from the years of brutal toil
and lonely patience in a barren hole.
When he went in the Bank their cups ran over.
They marvelled how he wore a milk-white shirt
work days and jeans on Sundays. He was saved
from their thistle-strewn farm and its red dirt.
And he said nothing. Hard and serious
like a young bear inside his teller's cage,
his axe-hewn hands upon the paper bills
aching with empty strength and throttled rage.
Overall, this poem seems to be about parents who worked hard with their hands and didn't have much income, but who sacrificed to put their son through the best schools they could find. They intended to "save" their son from having to work the "stony fields … thistle-strewn farm and its red dirt."
The son went along with it all, excelled in school, graduated, and got a teller's job in "the Bank" — made his parents proud and happy. BUT apparently he didn't like it! The image at the end (to me) is one of a big guy with huge hands, meant to work a farm, but instead is now handling paper money (bills). It seems he'd rather be using his strong hands out on the farm.
In the poem Warren Pryor by Alden Nowlan, it says "his axe-hewn hands upon the paper bills aching with empty strength and throttled rage." What does that mean?
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