Money Won’t Change It (but time will take you on)

Money Won’t Change It (but time will take you on)

By Cornelius Eady b. 1954 Cornelius Eady
You’re rich, lady, hissed the young woman at   
My mother as she bent in her garden.   
Look at what you’ve got, and it was   
Too much, the collards and tomatoes,   
A man, however lousy, taking care   
of the bills.

This was the reason for the early deaths   
My mother was to find from that point on,   
Turned dirt and the mock of roots,
Until finally, she gave her garden up.   
You can’t have nothing, she tells us,
Is the motto of our neighborhood,
These modest houses
That won’t give an inch.

Cornelius Eady, “Money Won’t Change It (but time will take you on)” from Autobiography of a Jukebox. Copyright © 1997 by Cornelius Eady. Used by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Source: The Autobiography of a Jukebox (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997)

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Poet Cornelius Eady b. 1954

POET’S REGION U.S., Midwestern

Subjects Money & Economics, Social Commentaries, Class, Gardening, Activities

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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Cornelius Eady

Biography

Poet and cofounder of Cave Canem, Cornelius Eady has published more than half a dozen volumes of poetry, among them Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name (1991), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist. Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems appeared in 2008.

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SUBJECT Money & Economics, Social Commentaries, Class, Gardening, Activities

POET’S REGION U.S., Midwestern

Poetic Terms Free Verse

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Originally appeared in Poetry magazine.

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