Poem-a-Day - "Sikasso Snow" by Fred L. Joiner

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January 19, 2023 

Sikasso Snow

Fred L. Joiner

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

Fred L. Joiner

Fred L. Joiner is the co-founder of The Center for Poetic Thought in Washington, D.C.. The former poet laureate of the town of Carrboro, North Carolina, he was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow in 2019.


“Dirt” by Kwame Dawes
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“The Mechanical Cotton Picker” by Tyree Daye
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Thanks to Tyree Daye, author of Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Daye’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.
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