Walnut, North Carolina

 

 

If only for a moment, it is all

around your route through Madison County—

white farmhouses, weathered mobile homes, graves,

dust barns, churches for the graying remnant.

 

Acres rise from shadowed to sunlit green,

purple-green up to the blue, overgrown

with old trees, new potatoes, tobacco, and weeds.

It smells of dirt, flowering fields, and woods.

 

Here the earth is too steep, too full of stone,

for much beyond subsistence farming, sleds,

and ideal spots for satellite dishes.

Husbands and wives work garden plots in twilight. . . .

 

Dice once clicked and sprang from mountain men's hands.

Silver coins clinked in blue pockets and gray.

Some women displayed naked ankles and

soft bosoms for coins not lost to the dice.

 

Other women birthed boys born to leave

for mills of the North, the lore of the West.

This leaving went on like years of foreign war.

Some came back wounded, some never returned.

 

Walnut survived until new road came through—

one stretch of new road, two hundred yards long.

Cut off by this bypass, emptied and lone,

the Hotel Switzerland quietly died. . . .

 

By church steps strewn with whittle stick shavings,

spit, and peelings from beer bottle labels,

in the shade of the old hanging tree,

it's Homecoming Day.  The women baked bread

 

all morning, preparing to serve dinner

on the ground for the prodigal souls' meek

return—

            native soil still under their nails

from fields now fallow (widows undressing in rain).

 

 

 

Michael Cody / PO Box 70279 / ETSU / Johnson City, TN 37614 / 423.439.6676 / codym@etsu.edu