Elegy for King Cotton

by D.B. Cox

--- for my grandfather

there's a hole in the sky
down by riverside
where the cotton mill
once blocked the sun

smokestack
shattered -
red bricks scattered like war
along a stagnant pond

the relentless clatter
of iron looms
that weaved its way
through

spider-cracked windows
& under closed doors
lately replaced
by an alien silence

that settles
on the mill village
like a sheet
tossed over a death-bed -

grim-faced workers
fetched
by the screaming whistle

three shifts a day
six days a week
to stream through
revolving metal gates

gone -
white bones
in the ground

the last page
of "king cotton"
written on a spinning wind
with wrecking-ball & crane

there's a hole in the sky
down by riverside

 

© 2006 D.B. Cox

D.B. Cox is a blues musician/poet from South Carolina. His writing has been published in Zygote In My Coffee, Remark, Underground Voices, Thunder Sandwich, Dublin Quarterly, Aesthetica, Bonfire, Gator Springs Gazette, Heat City Review, My Favorite Bullet and Open Wide Magazine. He has three books: “Passing For Blue” (published by Rank Stranger Press), “Lowdown” and “Ordinary Sorrows” (published by Pudding House Publications) available on the publishers' websites.