Poems

Peeps

Nativity, 1953

They talk of when
at Sam Born’s JustBorn Candy
near Bethlehem,
PA—Bethlehem Steel country—

a pink or blue
or mint green marshmallow star
appeared to two
non-union nougat bar

technicians on
their smoke-break (on graveyard, past midnight)
who saw their neon
harbinger glitter bright

as sugary
Fortune over Sam Born’s brand new
Peeps factory
(formerly Robert MacDou-

gal Printers, Inc.,
which Sam Born had bought for a refrain).
The chink-a-chink-a-chink
of Born’s aluminum Peep-train

snapping along
his rubberized conveyer belts
filled Born with long-
ing he’d not known since Yeltz,

the town near Minsk
where Born was born “Borniakov,”
where his parents
lived and died fearing the name of

God or Stalin, and
Born’s Peeps river now surged, flowed
into the open
backs of idling trucks which mowed

both West and East,
delivering Born’s succulent
puffed-air Peeps feast
to the soured mouths of reticent

Midwesterners,
to the fenced-in tongues of wild
Texas wildcatters,
to the tight-lipped pols who’ve filed—

just now—the last
installment of an old New Deal
screened on a fast
five-and-a-half-minute black-and-white newsreel.