Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (Kentucky Voices)

by bell hooks

Appalachian Elegy is a collection of poems that extend the process of lamentation. Dirge-like at times, the poems repeat sorrow sounds, connecting the pain of a historical Kentucky landscape ravaged by war and all human conditions that are like war. Nowadays we can hear tell of black jockeys, the ones who became famous. But where are the stories of all enslaved black servants who worked with horses, who wanted to mount and ride away from endless servitude? Those stories are silenced. Psychohistory and the power of ways of knowing beyond human will and human reason all ow us to re-create, to reimagine. 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.

again and again she calls me this wilderness within urging me onward be here make a path where the sound of ancestors speaks a language heard beyond the grave this earth I stand on belongs to the many dead treasure I find here is all gift tender solace holding back the future the dead that will not let us forget late ones and even further back the ancients dreaming achieving they will not let us forget time is aboriginal eternal they carry us back take us through the sacred portal that we may come again then again into the always present

hard rain softens harder ground from solid rock to mud so thick feet go under making every step dirge and trial even as joy surfaces at last today we plant we hope