Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (Kentucky Voices)

by bell hooks

have no fear here, in this world of trees, weeds, and growing things. This is the world I was born into: a world of wild things. In it the wilderness in me speaks. I am wild.

When poetry stirs in my imagination it is almost always from an indirect place, where language is abstract, where the mood and energy is evocative of submerged emotional intelligence and experience.

Poetry is a useful place for lamentation.

Poems of lamentation allow the melancholic loss that never truly disappears to be given voice. Like a slow solemn musical refrain played again and again, they call us to remember and mourn, to know again that as we work for change our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.

strong green growth

night moves through thick dark

pushing back brush

bequeath to me the hoe the hope

to shovel and sift

let snow soothe you

snow-covered earth such silence still divine presence

no water for holy cleansing no water for drying thirst

no eternity beckons just ongoing decay a deep smothering emptiness profound prolonged lamentation birds cry high

how to find another place where all is not yet barren

man has made time

grass beyond green

white wrath all nature slaughtered in the colonizing wake

soon hunters come soon comes dying soon we are captives

tap dancing on tin roofs

carry us closer to the sacred

calling the sacred rock on which to stand

strong roots sustaining life holding back the rush of time let earth testify

I rise restless watch the morning come sly slow

ghosts gather here make promises of resurrection and return

only faint traces of grief remain sorrow lingers making soil soul deep our weeping ground

let them sleep forever sublime

stark stolen sky no birds in flight in sight no sign that lush verdant life