Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (Kentucky Voices)

by bell hooks

I would come to associate the passion for freedom and the wildness I had experienced as a child with anarchy, with the belief in the power of the individual to be self-determining.

Folks from the backwoods were certain about two things: that every human soul needed to be free and that the responsibility of being free required one to be a person of integrity, a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says, and does.

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.

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.

autumn ending leaves like fallen soldiers

these structures carry the weight of history work done and undone memories of toil and torment

see past this all-surrounding whiteness that beyond there is hope that sorrow ends

ghosts return to these hills to grieve

all old souls chant be tender walk soft