Oak, Pine, Basswood

in mt. meigs, fields of ugly cotton plants persist,
their bolls colded over and forever done, afflicting the stalks
like boils, a mutated offspring of their ancestors—

which were so carefully
tended, every year new seeds sewn, the land then rife with surety
and always turned with the best

dung which yielded a most white and beautiful—
cotton flower

blossoming now are the ones who refuse to die,
this kind never die,
they must live and suffer