Family Portrait, 1790 by William Wright
North Carolina Blue Ridge
Here earth juts and tumbles in woods
where mountain creeks purl, slake through
rock, sluice schist coves and sheltered
gaps, then push hard through piebald sheer,
down to the slant of a cabin leaning:
Dusk’s long shadow flickers dark
in this singular room, where my kin huddle
around bacon and cabbage that snaps,
burbles over pine-hiss and ember—
Fire grinds the weight of nightfall
on their silence, toil-dark scowls
over tight frowns, throats hungry
to down day’s reaping. Here, land
is the sole tongue, etched in intricate syntax
of apple and trillium, the garden’s blood-idiom,
husk-dry stanzas quenched by prophecies
of rain. Nights, when their worn out bodies
die into sleep, their dreams are rationed
to applewood and rattlers, valleys’ tobacco
and fodders stacks, the few words passed
that I take with me, write down, and move on.
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