The Fiddler of Driskill Hill: Poems

Song of the Overseer

 Song of the Overseer Louisiana, the 1920s The whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight. —Exodus 12:6 I sat there on an easy swayback-mare, My shotgun, pistol, bullwhip by my side, Watcher of those brown hands well trained to tear White bolls from stems that blackened while they died. No bondsmen then but tenants holding on, In debt to those who paid them day by day By sack and weight, some broke in soul and bone, Time’s fugitives who could not run away. The big house in the distance and the row Of cabins where each freedman stayed a slave To keep the planters’ sons from plow and hoe All weathered what their seasons took and gave. Yet sometimes, plagued by heat in mid-July, We seemed to be in Pharaoh’s stricken land With loam for bricks but no straw gathered by, The Mississippi’s Lower-Kingdom sand. And there we toiled between the shack and hall Till bits drilled deep through earth’s sufficient soil Toward poison-fumes, dead creatures that appall, The fathers’ arpents leased for gas and oil. Our children will grow gray in that new age Where factory and plantation are at one Under no flag that rallies love or rage, Old Glory and the Stars and Bars undone. And I, no more the overseer of fields Where huge mechanic insects grasp and pull Seeds from seedpods—weevils of their own yields!— Am pastured now, late autumn’s slaughter-bull While blight spreads wide across the Promised Land Driving us back to Egypt, mile on mile, Not plowing forty acres well in hand But killing lambs at twilight by the Nile. ...