A Northerner Sees the Cottonfields for the First Time
The war between the states, that war of images in rout:
The beauty of Greek porches and the girls in white
Against the cotton fields. Each cast the other out.
These never met in any mind, seemed utter dark and light.
One from the South, the realist, refused the problem
That he could not solve, the other mad and blind,
Attacked without the saving answer in his mind.
This, the mythology of evil, this childish nightmare,
These fields festooned in white, these delicate bushes
Mahogany-color, sprinkled on earth dusty and bare
Like pretty handkerchiefs, this sight uprushes,
Seizes imagination, and all heart and mind,
Focuses on the children with their dirty trains
(Tow-sacks for cotton) like bedraggled queens.
Here are the living ghosts: standing behind each slave
A paler one, enslaved by righteousness who fought
With images of evil not his own and died to save
A world he never made but could destroy, one so distraught
By rage he undertook the fearful labor of a war:
Here in these fields are planted hot seeds of man's fate,
That legendary evil, passion, and the quick growth of hate.
How many times must unleashed rivers break
Out from their beds loosed by fanatic cloudburst?
How many times must human passions flood and shake
The structure of our lives before the mind is forced
To master those fierce living currents for its use,
Before we engineer and build a giant dam, release
Power implacably controlled, to light the world in peace?
Structure
28 lines · 4 stanzas