Sherry Chandler

Jim Wayne Miller

Steven R. Cope says of Jim Wayne Miller (and also here) that his poetry, especially in Copperhead Cane, is “…really good, in a way that leaves us going off mumbling to ourselves, staring deep into corners, smiling gummily at strangers” (from Kentucky Voices: A Bicentennial Celebration of Writing, Kentucky Center for the Arts, 1992). Copperhead Cane (Robert Allen Moore, 1964) is a series of elegiac sonnets written in memory of his grandfather. Miller’s first book of poems, it might also serve as an elegy for the tobacco culture that was definitive of Kentucky farming and central to its literature for over a century. “Hanging Burley” is from Copperhead Cane.

Hanging Burley

I’m straddling the top tier, my wet shirt clinging;
Under this hot tin roof, sweat balls and rolls.
Smothered in gummy green, my seared eyes stinging,
I’m hanging tobacco on peeled pine poles.
A funeral mood below me on the ground:
A blank-faced filing past the loaded sled;
A coming with a solemn swishing sound;
Tobacco borne as if it were the dead.
Even the children, shadowed by our grief,
Hang broken leaves and ape the studied pace.
— Let burley come, and save each frog-eyed leaf,
Till every wilted stick is hung in place,
Till gazing on the naked, empty field,
We see row after row your death revealed.

Possibly related posts:

Jim Wayne Miller on Jesse Stuart

Jesse Stuart on Tobacco

“Tobacco Mosaic”

The Farmgirl Poems

Ulysses May Not Find His Way Home

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