At the Market

They are haggling over the price of fruit.
There is an uproar. 
People take sides. 
The critics of puckish malice
will see how brazen this argument is. 
People get on their bandwagons. 
The seller and the buyer both
are susceptible to shouting. 
It’s obligatory that I tell the truth: 
The argument is bogus—a waste
of everybody’s time. 
It should never have started. 
It started about three pennies. 
I once read a retrospective on pennies. 
It was a milestone. 
The scholar’s argument began
from the assumption that the blurry beginnings
of money correlated
with the beginnings of civil conflict
and here we are still at it. 
 

“At the Market” from Sporatic Troubleshooting. Copyright © 2022 by Clarence Major. Used by permission of Louisiana State University Press.