Today we celebrate the birthday of Betty Adcock — one of the finest poets of the American South. Here is her haunting poem, “Louisiana Line,” a meditation on place, memory, and the way history keeps speaking through the things we build and leave behind. The poem moves with the quiet precision that characterizes Adcock's best work — cotton gins and icehouses, porch swings and lopped gates, and a wind that lifts "the thin flags of the town."
Adcock was born on this day in 1938 in San Augustine, Texas, and has lived much of her life in North Carolina. She published six collections of poetry, including Walking Out, Beholdings, and Rough Fugue, and received the Poets' Prize for Intervale: New and Selected Poems. In 2014 she was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.
Louisiana Line
by Betty Adcock
The wooden scent of wagons,
the sweat of animals—these places
keep everything—breath of the cotton gin,
black damp floors of the icehouse.
Shadows the color of a mirror’s back
break across faces. The luck
is always bad. This light is brittle,
old pale hair kept in a letter.
The wheeze of porch swings and lopped gates
seeps from new mortar.
Wind from an axe that struck wood
a hundred years ago
lifts the thin flags of the town.
Betty Adcock (born 1938) is an American poet. Raised in East Texas and long resident in North Carolina, she has published six collections of poetry, including Walking Out, Beholdings, and Rough Fugue. Her work is known for its precise imagery, a deep sense of place, and engagement with memory, history, and the rural South. She received the Poets' Prize in 2003 for Intervale: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2001).and was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014.
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