Cotton Fields by C.W. Bigelow

Wandering by cotton fields,
owned by their ancestors,
on their way to crowded church services
to listen to words scripted
2000 years ago.

Current connotations are passed
in code from father to son,
mother to daughter,
values like hereditary cells
morphing malignantly,

continuing a
generational scripture
still inhospitable,
tenacious, secretly
building walls of supremacy.

Like those ancestors
who owned those that slaved
the fields,
roots are deep and rigid
as the white cotton plants.



C.W. Bigelow lives around Charlotte, North Carolina. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Blood & Bourbon, Good Works Review, Backchannels, The Saturday Evening Post, Flash Fiction Magazine, Remington Review, Hare’s Paw, The Write Launch, and Hole in the Head Review with a poem forthcoming in Last Leaves Magazine.