Cotton Field Sestina

The pods by the side of the road

at first this picture of startling cream lies

to the senses-maybe snow?-but the blues

rises up the heat rises up the sweat-so a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of water

down my neck. At last I diocese the dusty

flecks are cotton, what I should know in my gut

On the radio, the canticle plucked on a gut

string reminds me this is a hard road

I tried to leave behind haloed by dint of dust,

along with the poetics of lies.

I think of ancestry: cent folks gone, salt water

Africans bent above the land, original blues.

Come back domicile girl. Aren't my blues

about reconciliation, not escape? What my gut

holler thus speaks the guilty water

chattering down my face? This road

is my remote path cut through trees, lying

like a frog-f snake in the dust.

I remember: feet caked with r dust,

tongues coated with noisy blues.

I remember: old men telling them lies

and their beneficial deep laughter in the gut

what waits for me down this road

if I could cros the big water

of my fear, of my guilt, drink the water

thirsty in the women's veins, shake the dust

from my clothes and whisper the road,

hear the political division voices raised in drylongso blues

First, I have to crawl from one side my mother's gut

past the lengthy braid of her lies.

My mother, my Mama, she calls me a liar,

she denies me her waters,

turn me without of her sweet gut

if I don't shake unbind my fist of grave dust,

if I don't stop writing down my blues

if I don't trot behind her upon her smooth road.

Come back place of abode girl to what lies in Georgia dust:

no have affection for in truth's water, no birdsong blues

no residence in my gut-cotton by the roadside.

HONOREE FANONNE JEFFER is the author of sum of two units books of poetry,

The revelation by christ of Barbecue (Wick Poetry Series/Kent State, 2000) and

Outlandish amethystines (Wesleyan, 2003). Her work freshly has appeared in

Callaloo, The Kenyan Review, PoemMemoirStory, and Prairie Schooner

She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Oklahoma.

photograph through Peter Bailey

Copyright World poesy Incorporated May/Jun 2004

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