We planted cotton
and scarred our hands,
came home to make love
and fell asleep instead.
Greed is a wicked half-sister.
You filled your hands with it,
and for a moment
color lost its importance.
I stand with others
holding my infant son,
every one of my possessions
along the highway
defining our misery.
Background: In 1939, in New Madrid County, Missouri, plantation owners evicted both black and white tenant farmers and sharecroppers from land they had farmed for decades. The federal government had offered a check to help the workers. By evicting them, the plantation owners were able to keep all of the money for themselves.
| Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
Michael, just a word of deep thanks from myself personally and on behalf of our whole staff and of the Moristotle & Co.'s readers, for today's poem and its three succeeding poems, “Reparations Parts 1, 2, & 3.” All of us who care should be full of mind, engaged in searching our souls.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
ReplyDeleteI also feel by evicting these families, the landowners actually stole money meant for them and their survival. The evicted families lined the highway with all of their worldly possessions. To make matters worse, the governor ordered them away from the roadway and they ended up in some kind of tent camp. How many children and elderly people died in the cold of that winter? I do not know. What happened to then? Again, I do not have an answer. I do know the landowners became quite a bit richer.
ReplyDeleteThe capacity of human beings to be cruel to each other seems to have no boundaries. The most shocking thing is that it is not shocking.
ReplyDelete