Listen Here (51 page)

from
Appalachian Heritage
(1985)

This windy morning as I stuffed
The rags around my window sill,
I found the strips that she had tucked
Against a wind that now is still.

Her rags were brown, and mine are gray
Hers stained and rotted; mine are new;
And yet, as women learn to stuff
(As once, at least, all women do)
Rags against terror—so she bent—
Then I, and now our rags are blent
Gray in the brown; from hill to hill
My wind goes screaming—hers is still.

(H
EAVY WITH
C
HILD
)

from
Hill Daughter
(1991)

Last night as I lay cold with fear
Of my travail now drawing near,
A gray wind I no longer hear
Blew from the darkness over me—
Blew southward from the Norn-white skies
Until I slept with seeing eyes—
Seeing no bauble fit to prize.

Not seeing dawn, its thin gray trace
Turn gold upon the pillow lace
And touch the warm beloved face.
Not seeing all I lived to own:
The torque of rubies, stone by stone,
The living pages touched and known.

Seeing instead that nets are small
Which shield us from the sparrow's fall,
How frail the rooftree and the wall,
How thin the string by which we tie
Our great ships of the wind and sky—
And what a little thing to die.

from
Hill Daughter
(1991)

Land of my fathers and blood, oh my fathers, whatever
Is left of your grudge in the rock, of your hate in the stone;

I have brought you at last what you sternly required that I
bring you,

And have brought it alone.

I, who from the womb must be drawn, though the first born,
a daughter,

And could never stand straight with the rifle, nor lean with
the plow;

Here is ease for the curse, here is cause for the breaking of
silence.

You can answer me now.

It has taken me long to return, and you died without
knowing,

But down where the veins of the rock and the aspen tree
run—

Land of my fathers and blood, oh my fathers, whatever
Is left of your hearts in the dust,
I have brought you a son.

from
Paradox Hill
(1972)

Arrow grasses by the river,
Phalanx, spear by spear arrayed,
Teach us that we may remember
Others here have walked afraid.

Teach us—all our generation—
We are not the first to know
Death and war and red transgression
Where these quiet waters flow.

Long ago our father's father
Here in springtime dropped his corn,
Died and fell, an arrow winging
In his heart that April morn—

Dead as you and I will ever
Lie beneath the atom's burst—
Arrow grasses by the river,
Teach us we are not the first,

Nor the last to live in danger,
Live in wonder and in woe,
Here on earth beside the river,
Where the quiet waters flow.

from A Patch Of Earth

Until I was sixteen years old, until the roads came, the farm was about all I knew: our green meadows and hilly pastures, our storied old men, the great rolling seasons of moon and sunlight, our limestone cliffs and trickling springs. It was about all I knew, and, except for my father and before him, the old Rebel Captain, all that any of us had even known: just the farm and our little village down at the crossroads, and the worn cowpaths winding the slopes; or we kids driving the cows home in the summer evenings; or the winter whiteness and stillness, Aunt Malindy's “old woman in the sky” picking her geese, the “old blue misties” sweeping out of the north.

Some of our tales were old and old, going back into time itself, American time. Living so long there in the same field under the same gap in the mountain, we had seen, from our own ragged little edge of history, the tall shadows passing by. “Old Hickory” in his coach passed along our dug road one morning; General Lee one evening on his way to the Gauley rebel camps. Then, in 1863, as we watched from our cliff walls and scrub oak bushes, the great Yankee army passed on its way to the Battle of Droop: all day long the clank and spur and roll of their passage, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, hard, blue Yankees, their bayonet tips made bloody in the sunset.

Grandpa Tom, our “old one,” had gone with George Rogers Clark to Kaskaskia and had run the Falls of the Ohio under an eclipse of the sun. Uncle Bill went to Point Pleasant against old Cornstalk and his Ohio Shawnee; then Little Uncle John to the War of 1812; Captain Jim to the Virginia Rebels, his brother Al to the Yankees. My father, in 1906, sailed with Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet; then Cousin Paul and Cousin Coe “to make the world safe for Democracy.”

But before I grew up and went out into the world—and a bloody thing I found it—we were all at home there in our faded cottage in the meadow, all of us safe and warm. Sometimes now, a quiet sense comes to me, the cool mist blowing in my face as though I am walking through islands of fog and drifting downhill slowly southward until I feel the mountains behind my shoulder. Walking on, I can see the light in the “big room” window as I come to our cottage standing in the meadow under “Bridger's” Mountain, as it always stands on the fore-edges of my memory, and the old farm where I ran the April fields and pastures to my great rock up in the woodland where the lavender hepaticas grew. Then I knew just the earth itself: the quiet measure of the seasons; the stars in the sky; the wheat field in August, golden: darkness and day; rain and sunlight; the primal certainty of spring. Then we were all there together, the years not yet come on us, these seventy-five years of war and money and roaring turnpikes and torrents of blood.

I know, deep down, that our one old farm is only a ragged symbol, a signet mark for all the others, the old and far older hard scrabble mountain farms of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, all the briery fields scattered across the mountains south. And how the earth holds us is still a dark question. It is not the sucking deepness that draws us, for the earth is mother, protector, the home; but the oppressor too. It requires, sometimes, the very lifeblood of its own, and imprisons the flyaway dreams and bends the backs of men and women. Yet to love a familiar patch of earth is to know something beyond death, “westward from death,” as my father used to speak it.

We could sense, just beyond our broken-down line fences, the great reach of the American continent flowing outward. Because we stood so long in one place, our rocky old farm and the abundant earth of the continent were linked together in the long tides of the past. Because the land kept us, never budging from its rock-hold, we held to our pioneer ways the longest, the strongest; and we saw the passing of time from a place called solid, from our own slow, archean, and peculiar stance.

(November 1, 1919–January 2, 1972)

Jane Hess Merchant, one of four children of Donia Swann Merchant and Clarence Leroy Merchant, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lived all her life. Debilitated by a bone disease, Merchant spent her adult life in bed, writing poetry that ranged from humorous reflections to religious meditations. When she became deaf in the final years of her life, she relied on the written word as her primary means of communication.

More than fifteen hundred of her poems have been published in newspapers and magazines in the United States, Canada, and England.

Her talent has been acknowledged by awards from the National League of American Pen Women for
The Greatest of These
and
Blessed Are You.
She received the 1961 Lyric Foundation Citation and Award for Outstanding Achievements in Poetry, and the 1965 Beaudoin Gemstone Award for Poetry.

Poetry:
Because It's Here
(1970),
Every Good Gift
(1968),
All Daffodils Are Daffy
(1967),
Petals of Light
(1965),
The Mercies of God
(1963),
Blessed Are You
(1961),
In Green Pastures
(1959),
Halfway up the Sky
(1957),
Think about These Things
(1956),
The Greatest of These
(1954).

Contemporary Authors
, New Revision Series, Vol. 4, 416. Lillian Keller, “Through a Poets Window,
” Progressive Farmer
(April 1952).
Publishers Weekly
(January 24, 1972). Grace Watkins, “The Poetry Merchant,”
Christian Herald
(November 1954).

from
The Greatest of These
(1954)

My parents carried light with them, for they
Lived in the days when people made their own
Or did without. The lantern's frosty ray,
When Dad came late from milking, always shone
As if a star were coming home to us,
And if I called at midnight, goblin-harried,
The shadows fled and night grew luminous
Before the little lamp that Mother carried.

Folk have small need of lamps and lanterns now;
Even on farms the darkness will withdraw
By swift electric magic, but somehow
I always shall be grateful that I saw
My parents' coming make the darkness bright
And knew them as the carriers of light.

from
The Greatest of These
(1954)

When it's too soon for spring, and even too soon
To think of it, you'd think—some afternoon
You're sure to raise your eyes and see them there
Cresting the topmost ridge that tries to pare
Whole sections from the sky; a man and team
Of horses plowing. Cloud and clod would seem
To feel the plowshare equally. You wonder
If the sun itself isn't apt to be plowed under
In that steep enterprise. It makes you proud
Of men who'll start out halfway up a cloud
To sketch designs for summer on a land
That isn't sure of spring. You understand,
Of course, it's hard work plowing on a hill,
And bottom lands grow better crops, but still
There's something useful to the heart and eye
In men who plow the earth, against the sky.

(October 19, 1879–March 19, 1919)

Writer and painter Emma Bell Miles was born to Martha Ann Mirick Bell and Benjamin Franklin Bell. Her mother was visiting relatives in Evanston, Illinois, away from their home along the Ohio River in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, when she gave birth to twins. Miles's brother lived only one day. Both parents were teachers and strict Presbyterians. Because of her frail health, Miles was educated mostly at home, where she learned at a young age to read and enjoy nature studies with her mother.

In hopes that a climate change would improve her health, the family moved south in 1891 to Walden's Ridge, Tennessee, near Chattanooga. By 1899, Miles was strong enough to begin attending the St. Louis School of Art, and her father planned to send her to New York to study art. But Miles had plans of her own, and she married mountaineer Frank Miles in 1901. Their twin daughters were born in 1902, and three other children followed by 1909.

Her marriage to Frank was a rocky one with frequent moves and a pattern of separations and reunions. They lived in a tent when they could not afford better housing, and she sold sketches to the summer people to support the family. With her husband often out of work, Miles frequently was responsible for keeping the struggling family finances afloat.

By 1903, Miles had met writers Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke, successful collaborators and sisters who were published authors of novels, stories, and poems. They helped Miles to get her first publications, two poems and a nonfiction article, in
Harper's Monthly
in 1904. The article became a chapter of her first book,
The Spirit of the Mountains
, a landmark study that inspired Horace Kephart's
Our Southern Highlanders
and others with her keen observations and frank admiration of mountain people.

Nonfiction:
Our Southern Birds
(1919),
The Spirit of the Mountains
(1905).
Poetry:
Strains from a Dulcimore
(1930).

Kay Baker Gaston,
Emma Bell Miles
(1985).