Digging Holes (In the Alabama Rain)

by Kenneth Francis (November 2020)

Death and the Gravedigger, Carlos Schwabe, 1895

Got a job in a graveyard near Jackson
Hurts my bones but doesn’t hurt my brain
Chucked my phone into the Chattahoochee River
After digging holes in the Alabama rain

No more a slave for the psychos of silicone
No more bondage or a shallow corporate whore
No more masks, no more lies, or sleazy living
No longer owe my soul to the company store

Now birds singing greet me every fine morning
And I can smell the wet clay off the plains
I start work early and finish at sundown
After digging holes in the Alabama rain

Alabama is best of neighbor red states
West Virginia is too poor through and through
Carolina, she’s too much like Indiana
But Alabama, I’ll be staying home with you

It’s sometimes spooky in this windy old churchyard
From dawn to dusk, I keep digging coffin holes
At the weekend, I spread the Word to lost barflies
As the devil, he comes looking for their souls

Many of his traitors haunt the dark side of Dixie
As they try to bury Modesty, Morality, and God
Tomorrow’s list includes Truth and First Amendment
As they aim to place them, beneath the wet Dixie sod

My bones belong here in God’s little acre
And when I’m dying, I’ll be hoping and praying
That my soul will make its way into Heaven
As I’m lowered down, in the Alabama rain

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Kenneth Francis is a Contributing Editor at New English Review. For the past 20 years, he has worked as an editor in various publications, as well as a university lecturer in journalism. He also holds an MA in Theology and is the author of The Little Book of God, Mind, Cosmos and Truth (St Pauls Publishing) and, most recently, The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd (with Theodore Dalrymple).

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