Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves

are strung along a stick, the women

standing in the August heat for hours—since first light—

under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet

the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt.

The older children hand the leaves from the slide,

three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers

for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides

waiting in what little shade there is: it’s ten o’clock,

almost dinnertime. They pull the pails of cold lunch

 and Mason jars of tea out of the spring

when they see the farmer coming from the field, their men

stripped to the waist, polished by sweat and tired as mules.

By afternoon, the loose cotton dresses, even

the headrags are dark with sweat.

Still their fingers never miss a stitch,

though they’re paid not by the stick but by the day,

and the talk—unbroken news of cousins and acquaintances—

unwinding with the ball of twine, a frayed snuff-twig

bouncing on one lip, the string paying out

through their callouses, the piles of wide gren leaves

diminishing, until the men appear with the last slide

and clamber up the rafters of the barn

to line the loaded sticks along the tiers. It’s Friday;

the farmer pays with a wad of ones and fives,

having turned the mule out to its feed and water,

hung up the stiffened traces and the bit. He checks

again the other barns, already fired, crude ovens

of log and mud where the corn is cured;

in that hot dry acrid air, spreads a yellowing leaf

across his palm, rolls and edge in his fingers,

gauging by its texture and its smell

how high to drive the fire.

His crew is quiet in the pickup truck—did you think

they were singing? They are much too tired to even speak,

can barely lick salt from the back of a hand, brush at flies,

hush a baby with a sugartit. And the man

who owns this land is also tired.

Everyday this week he’s meant to bring home pears

from the old tree by the barn, but now he sees

the fruit has fallen, sees the yellow-jackets feeding there.

He lights a Lucky, frames a joke for his wife—he’ll say

their banker raised a piss-poor field this year.

And she will lean against the doorjamb

while he talks, while he scrubs his hands at the tin basin

with a split lemon and a pumice stone, rubs them raw

trying to cut the gummy resin, that stubborn

black stain within the green.