Blood always tells.

Blood always tells who you love

                           who you're gonna betray.

That red liquor always knows who you are

                                             what side you’re on.

Do your veins tap into that beautiful life-blood of the heated South?

Does your heart pump love for verandas

                                         for wisteria

                                         for red-dirt roads

                                         for whisky

                                         for ice-blocks that melt too quick?

Do you hear

Do you feel

Are you that deep pride?

           That visceral war-cry that you race in your heart before screaming?

Do you see the ghosts?

There they glide. The slave-owners, the slaves, the natives.

Do you understand? You stand on their land.

                               The natives, the slaves, the slave-owners.

You breathe them, you are them. Let’s see your heart then.

 (When you lay your hand on the black corn soil,

                                                                       Do You Feel It?

         The beating heart of the South?)

The South will love you if you are her child.

The South will kill you if you are her child.

No one lives in her. They die in her.

(When you feel her beating heart)

Black soil – black as death and black for life

Red-dirt roads – red as blood in dead hearts

She steals them, you know. Two lovers are gently rolled in her

                                                                                             (black)

earth, and she loves them.

She takes their poor dead hearts.

She coddles them and spreads them out in winding shelves in stacks so little children can

         skip on them to school.

That deep Heart of the South

Those deep hearts of the Southerners.

Do you feel it?

That doom

        doom

        doom?

That’s your ancestors.

Come home, my boy.

Come on down

           down

           down

Come on down and feel the heart-blood of the dear

                                                                    old

                                                                    South.