Poem: Dead Man Mountain

Here is another poem I wrote after hearing a sad story of a sharecropper in the Ouachita mountains of western Arkansas. I tried to be true to the story as I heard it.


Dead Man Mountain

Once, through my youth, a poor man passed and travell'd by a lonely path
that oft' I wander in my thoughts to grieve for prey of Fortune's wrath.
The trav'ler left a shadowed past and in the valleys fell at last
to strike a deal to rent the land a failing farmer leased too fast.

'Twas sixty acres that he planted, cotton that he quickly sowed,
yet carefully, lest any foot yield less than that he thought it owed.
And then he waited for the harvest, waited while Job with him watched --
he watched the cotton grow and ripen: dress and shirt and rag and swatch.

At last there came the day when oven-sun and earth had done their work,
and cotton burst like downy popcorn -- long-awaited harvest work.
Then frantic'ly he reaped the cotton, labored on the mountainside
and filled his wagon, yoked his horses, whipped them t'ward a two-day ride.

And in the farmer's name (by law) the poor man sold his cotton crop,
but cash-rain fell to credit's claws and to his hands fell not a drop.
Then, as he climbed into the wagon, empty now of all but pride,
his head held high, his rough face stern, he closed his eyes to life and cried.

At journey's end he found himself, and so he stepped down from his life,
hung up the reins with weary hands, now spent and cotton callouse-rife,
and shook his lowered, thinning head -- he moved his lips as if to pray --
"A pair of shoes was all I wanted. . ." that was all he found to say.

And then he left us, wending up a mountain man had yet to name,
but as he went, we each looked down to see his feet (though more for shame)
were bare as newborn babes', but rough from years of toil and war with sod --
then he was gone, adopted by the nameless mountain near to God.

A few years later on that mount, a skeleton men sadly found
and gave a long-deserved fun'ral -- buried it in hallowed ground.
And then and there they named that mountain, named it Dead Man for the soul
whom Fate had found her finest fool, whom life could torment, death, console.