I know a man who said, Remember when tobacco
was green and king and England was queen,
And then George Washington was queen?
Nope, don’t remember, I said. Did the oxen
tramp down their idea for an eventual Beltway?
The broad leaves dried in bales then hung in a barn
Like a great colony of reeking brown bats.
You could pay your debts with tobacco.
You could pay a man for a weeks’ work with it.
One pound of tobacco to two fat pounds of pullet.
One slave tilling 6000 hills of tobacco.
But the railroad tracks came and wherever they ran,
they flung towns and prosperity left and right
like so much shining sadfaced mud.