Cane

Chapter 4: REAPERS

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About This Book

The work assembles lyric sketches, poems, and short stories that move between the rural Black South and the urban North, rendering scenes of field labor, small-town intimacies, migration, and city struggle. Its language blends musical, imagistic poetry with prose vignettes, shifting tone from sensual celebration and folklore to psychological tension and spiritual searching. Structurally divided into three parts, it juxtaposes primitive southern evocations, a middle section of urban self-consciousness, and a return offering more meditative, symbolic pieces. Recurring themes include racial identity, desire, community, and the search for meaning through artistic and spiritual expression.

REAPERS

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,

And start their silent swinging, one by one.

Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,

And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,

His belly close to ground. I see the blade,

Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.