Eighty six stalks

 Eighty-six stalks 

Johnclarestokes 

We never counted how many sugar cane

stalks it took to make sixty gallons of

juice in the Columbus kettle to boil down

to ten gallons of bottled syrup

We never counted how many turns

it took to squeeze the juice from

the Georgia Red we fed

to fill the five gallon buckets

we poured into the boiling down.

We never counted the years we 

circled the mill on the old Gravely

we didn’t think we had to

It was taken for granted we had time to.