Sweet Potato Baby

Anytime one of my favorite writers writes something new, I notice.  Here is a new poem from my wife Annette.  I am pleased to bring this to the notice of those who may not know or have forgotten that she is the writer in the family.

            SWEET POTATO BABY

It resembled a baked sweet potato

this premature infant girl

born to an Alabama debutante

who fell hard for crack cocaine.

The father a black man

no one even knows who.

The child with a multitude of special needs

will be raised by her maternal grandmother.

The maternal grandfather lies buried

in the South Alabama black-belt dirt

on the miles of acreage he owned

and owned also the money

and the government

and the people

for many years paying black workers

with tokens to his general store.

When the sweet potato baby’s mother was a child

this man, the landowner-baron,

hired black children to play with her

and pull her around in a bright red wagon.

And whenever a truly outlandish thing happened

this man would slap his thighs and exclaim:

“Well I’ll be a nigger baby!”

In the dark arts, words are known to have power.

An incantation, rightly spoken,

can Poof! call into being the very thing it names.

Will the sweet potato baby resemble the grandfather?

Have his narrow eyes?  His hard jaw?

This old fool, inheritor of a decayed plantation,

might have been more cautious in his pronouncement.

might have thought

how words conjure.

            --Annette Cotter