Welty, Photograph and the Cotton Fields

Eudora Welty,
"Chopping Cotton in the Field", 1935



GROTTO
I don’t want anything bright or Hellenic.
I prefer commercial airplane turbines, their
domestic soot
to the alabaster sail of Ulysses’ ship
on the high seas.
I prefer an eclipse to Calypso.
I don’t want anything truly white.
I dismiss the herons’ delta wing,
its aero-dynamic flight,
I swap it for the scurrying of sewage rats,
their Chinese rush,
their post-traumatic stress:
I’m proud of such clean creatures.
I also refuse the white page:
I undertake its disfiguration
with black blood, as a white man
is disfigured in Harlem.
I will not start to imagine how slaves
might have felt in the cotton fields.

Daniel Jonas, 2008

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