Sikasso Snow

never thought I
would see it here
in this Otherwhere,
no plantation in sight

no patterned pods
for the picking,
nor calloused hands
to plow & gin

an untouched December
bluff surrounded by scrubs of green
blowing along
a dust-whipped road heading south
toward no one’s harvest.

Copyright © 2023 by Fred L. Joiner. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 19, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“My mother’s family owned their own cotton fields in South Carolina, but that land was taken when my grandfather mysteriously ‘died’ from an equally mysterious gunshot wound in those same fields. This poem came to me while living in Mali, West Africa, heading south on the road from Bamako to Sikasso. Mali’s Sikasso region is known as the breadbasket, where the rest of the country gets a lot of its produce. It is also where a lot of the country’s cotton is cultivated for Mali’s world-renowned textiles. I cried, watching bluffs of cotton blow so freely across the road, thinking about all of my kin and what they must have endured, and the pain of losing that land after my grandfather’s untimely death.”
—Fred L. Joiner