Summer Sonnet 28: A Black Inmate Foresees a Plague

I can hear the shackles in my bones
like a chain gang in Carolina fields
Hot iron weeps the mutilated tones
of the cross that guilty men do yield.

Corrosive red teet bite down into flesh
as metal mouths chew as the rawness.
Wailing widow songs serenade the thresh
Southern sorghum laid for a distiller's press.

Men no longer cry at outrageous deeds
the pitiless world laureled on their brow.
But swing sling blades low and uproot the weed
choking the sharecroppers buried field ploughs.

In rusted marrow these cutlass chains turn
as plague ravaged pyres of corpses burn.

-By Aurin Squire