A journey through my life in textiles

In St Clair County, Alabama, I started as a duffer

on my 6th birthday, and still having ten fingers on my tenth

I was by turns a sweeper and a tender

to looms and other machines.

The smell of machine oil and dirt became the air

I breathed for Mr. Comers deadly promises.

 We made thread and cloth and socks on machine,

until I went down the river to Montgomery for a while

finding my way out to the ocean

where Mobile Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico

We loaded cotton onto barges to run blockades

For cash money for English factories

and we delivered uniform cloth

to rebel sewing plants along the way

We didn’t think about right or wrong,

only surviving against starvation and cannonballs,

neither side had many heroes

and now, a hundred years later in a studio off Brickell

I make art with the worn fabrics of that time,

 the air is cleaner and no one is shooting at us,

at least not much but starvation is still lurking

down the street while I paint gruesome war scenes

on textiles of my mind, not so much cannon balls

as the hungry faces of the children, black and white,

still no justification for me or my kind,

only torn and frayed fabric

of memories of the evils of man.