Silk Hope, North Carolina

The orange clay, everywhere underfoot,
Has dried to a caked an cracking slab
and its fine dust settles over everything
and if sunset fell the wrong way.

But the daily-watered tobacco
is still green and flowering--two months yet
to picking time-- and the corn, three quarters
grown and still shy
of the height of a man, grows quickly
in anticipation of fall.

Shotgun houses line the dirt roads,
each with its own plot of clay, hand pump,
and outhouse.

The windsilt, like ash from an ancient fire,
covers the houses, gray and worn
and giving in to the dust of the road.
The children here are as tan as the land, barefoot and skinny
with their eyes laid back in their heads,
their ancestry an impossible blend

Indian blood and African
flow in the same veins and that
of those proud Caucasian settlers.
Here, everyone's roots are the same.

This is old Lumbee country- tucked into the hills
and trapped between mountain and sea, the land
once stolen and used, washed out
and given back to the poor.
The land, exhausted, gives up,
and fades into drought again.