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The Drive Through Eastern North Carolina
The highway shoots off to impale the horizon,
a lance, unswerving, forlorn, and interminable,
flanked at times by gangly rows of long-leaf pine
which give away to the legions of cotton and tobacco
covering oceanic expanses of prostrate, sandy land,
pock-marked by mobile homes, silos, brick houses,
and derilict wooden shacks held together by poison ivy.
Sunlight streams through giant shifting clouds
so that the intense green of fresh growth in the fields
glows brilliantly against the heavy dark gray of a thunderstorm sky,
pierced by the careening dot of a solitary crow.
An old black woman stands in her front yard with hedge-clippers,
a mile away a produce stand peddles boiled peanuts
and corn on the cob, nestled in a multitude of pumpkins.
Wafts of smoke-smell from burning leaves float on the wind
ruffling the trees who're beginning to blush with color.
