After a two-decade hiatus, Lenski returned to poetry in the late 1940s, while she was researching and writing "Cotton in My Sack". She later explained that she needed a song for her white cotton-pickers, and as the only picking songs she had found during her research belonged to the distinctive traditions of African-American pickers, she wrote a song for her characters. In the early 1950s, a prolonged illness prevented her from working on books, but she was able to write poems and lyrics. Collaborating with the author and composer Clyde Robert Bulla, she produced a book of hymns and two other songbooks.