The New Cotton
Rent from DeepDyve- The New Cotton
They are just boys Chain ganged to the side of the road, Dressed to the nines in sunny orange, That shade of red that never Seems to set, familiar color Of that foreign flower, The kind you can close your Eyes in sleep and still see, But these boys are not flowers Anymore, no thing that can be Seen to bloom has been left to bloom, In this place where a chain around a Black man’s ankle is that state’s Jewel, but if you still own your Eyes, you know, they are still boys.
They do not yet know how To bend, someone has not yet Passed on the secret of how To save their backs for the rest Of the journey, someone forgot To offer the old way of how To get through the whip Of their young days in order To reach the sweet rock of Their old, they angle And arc carelessly, not knowing They are matchsticks of American History, never squatting down low In the grass, never bending At the ankle or thigh. [End Page 88]
They are such proud brittle lion Trees about to break in every Direction, but free, the weave of All their fabric wasted In the constant picking up Of useless plastic things, That as I get closer to them, That as I pass, Looks white and sticky plump, Some kind of new cotton Stuck inside their reaching Robeson hands. [End Page 89]
Nikky Finney won the National Book Award in poetry last year (2011) for her fourth poetry collection, Head Off and Spit: Poems. A charter member of the Affrilachian Poets, she resides in Lexington, Kentucky, where she has been a professor at the University of Kentucky for eighteen years. She credits Nikki Giovanni and Giovanni’s mother for critiquing her first poems and encouraging her through the years.
