Classic Poem

In them days
they won't hardly no way to know if
somebody way off
died
till they'd be
dead and buried


and Uncle Jim

hitched up a team of mules to the wagon
and he cracked the whip over them
and run them their dead-level best
the whole thirty miles to your great grandma's funeral
down there in
Green Sea County


and there come up this
awfulest rainstorm
you ever saw in your whole life
and your grandpa
was setting
in a goat-skin bottomed chair

and them mules a-running
and him sloshing round in that chairful of water


till he got scalded
he said


and ev-
ery
anch of skin come off his behind:

we got there just in time to see her buried
in an oak grove up
back of the field:

it's growed over with soapbushes and huckleberries now.