Image courtesy of Lars Hammar. Shared via a Creative Commons license.

 

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The Happy-Slave Motif

When I burst out of coagulated American clay,
pumpkin-headed, carrot-fingers popping through
where topsoil used to lay, I break bedrock,
spit sand, rip roots, shake off my net of stones
(affixed to send us sea-sick slaves to Ginen),
get to work.

Let that familiar song strike up:
We nation’s engines, spleens and livers
sieving blood and bile for a drink,
dirt-laborers of this America,
we damned vegetables.

But fortified by feeding on our brothers’ rot,
we drag her oxidized, salt-white torch, a monumental
plow that cuts the plains and mountains into Empire,
‘til we pass out of her like stones, splash blood-cloud into river,
run, ominous colors, down her legs—Sing! O failing organs,
pulling that pyramidal millstone over those amber waves of grain:
“She so heavy.”

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Christopher Cartright grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He obtained his MFA from Florida State University and lives in Savannah, GA. He teaches at Armstrong University and edits Blacktop Passages.