Seeds of change among changed ground.

The young ploughman of this poem is a hero of the land, a praise the lines "an emblem of impossible prophecy" raise. This phrase is the crux of the poem.
Throughout the poem the author brings out just how seemingly impossible a black man becoming President of the United States is. He begins with the word "turmoil".
"Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving--" This word "turmoil" by itself is vague and paints only a hazy picture. What kind of turmoil was it from which this apparent "emblem" so heroically emerged? The poet, however, does not leave the picture so vague. He quickly sets the scene of a chaotic crowd: "A field of snow-flecked/cotton/forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens/...while lined on one branch, is/a tense/court of bespectacled owls and.../a gesticulating scarecrow."
It is through this crowd that the poet's hero drives his plough: "a crowd/dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,/parting for their president..." To be sure, such a feat is no less than heroic. A field before it is ploughed is tough and dry, and certianly not easily broken up. We can see the hardness of the ground through an understanding of the historical allusions in the text, of which there are many. The very title, "Forty acres" alludes to the Jim Crow Laws of post Civil War America, where freed blacks recieved just forty acres and a mule from their government. Of course, later references such as "a field of snow-flecked cotton" and "the lynching tree" speak more of this. As the ploughman breaks up this ground it cries out in change, "The small plough continues...beyond the moaning ground".
Yet the ploughman realizes this pain, and moreover feels it himself: "and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins/heart, muscles, tendons..." But he plunges on, ploughing "till the land lies open...", regardless of how deep the furrow may lie in the wake behind him.
The piece closes on the hope that may lie in such deeply broken up ground: "till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure/light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower." According to this, the deeper the furrow of change that streaks across our nation, the deeper within that new ploughed ground any coming seeds of hope might be planted.
Who will this future sower of hope be? Perhaps from among all the broken up ground a new emblem will arise.