Cotton Pickers Lament
Cotton Picker’s Lament
Feet burn soul blends with the earth, the heat, the picking season
Hands, hard calloused leather punctuated by picking scars
Drag that long sack behind me across black bottom earth—
Cottonseed tucked into its sprouting place, waiting for the sun to make it spring
White from its deflowered purple-black boll
Exploding like my brain in the heat--
That old river floods into my fields cooling’
Leathered hot feet in muddied delta earth
Leaving part of Memphis between my toes—
I go into those off beat juke joints at night to drink my pain
Away and listen to the blues reach deep into my soul
Crying for me and for all of us, those Delta Blues!
Toothless, grinning, strumming cigarette smoking, whisky breath fools breaking sounds across early morning light lamenting love, lost times, freedom.
Freedom? Man is never free, just gets new masters--
Straggle home- dawn breaks Sunday- Church
Calls, songs of belief echo across Delta flats
White shingled churches hold the promise of another freedom--
Jesus where are you when I call from those fields
Cotton boll hard, painful against my moving hands
Must be like you felt, thorns pressed into your head.
Back bent never straight from years of bending
Shoulders strong from hauling that sack
Cotton sack breaks my back--
Sunup - misty Monday morning in the Delta
Mississippi fields where cotton is king and I its slave
Old muddy river runs faster then I do- at least going somewhere…
Bend my back, twist that boll, never can straighten up and walk like a man!
Copyright © Alex J Stokas | Year Posted 2020
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