Haint-Blue Letter

[Verse 1]
The bag of Black Kow manure split open Tuesday morning,
Spilled a smell like the pluff mud you told me held the story.
I was potting Japanese ferns for a tourist from Ohio,
Reading the Latin tag, tryna map the phylum for my own bio.
Spent a decade rinsing that red clay off my knuckles in a UGA lab sink,
thinking your bottle trees were just a kind of crazy I couldn't drink.
A chip on my shoulder thick as chitin on a June bug's back,
I was running from the roots, trying to scrub the whole damn track.

[Chorus]
So this is the letter I never sent, the words that got stuck in the loam,
the thank-you note I’m writing on a specimen tag to bring you home.
For the haint-blue paint you slapped on the ceiling to keep the trouble out,
I see the science in it now, I finally know what you were talking about.

[Verse 2]
And now I'm in this greenhouse, it's a hundred-and-three degrees,
Remembering you telling stories 'bout the Boo Hags in the live oak trees.
Salt on the threshold, rice in the braids for a blessing on the bride,
a whole different taxonomy for what you had to keep inside.
You said, "Chile, that ain't dirt, that's just what's left of the talkin'",
a library of pollen in the mud I was mockin'.
You were mapping trophic cascades on the back of a church fan,
with a felt-tip pen and the salt-stained wisdom of a Gullah clan.

[Chorus]
So this is the letter I never sent, the words that got stuck in the loam,
the thank-you note I’m writing on a specimen tag to bring you home.
For the haint-blue paint you slapped on the ceiling to keep the trouble out,
I see the science in it now, I finally know what you were talking about.

[Outro]
The bag of Black Kow manure smells like a low-tide eulogy.
Guess you were trying to tell the native from the invasive, too. Just like me.