Rivers of Legacy

Where the sidewalk ends
Past the poplars
Near the pasture with the liquid-eyed Guernsey
Red dust rises
In Arkansas air
To fall like powder
On my sleeping fathers.

Limestone markers
Dimmed by age
Tilt above Scotch-Irish bones.
Bones that worked this poor soil
Coaxing cotton from clay
Bottomland hardly worth the spit that watered it.

Those old lips gunned tobacco juice on June bugs.
Hands, hard and calloused
Fingers, cracked and bent
Harnessed dray mules
Slaughtered hogs
Skinned deer
Thumped the noggins of rowdy boys
In the pews at Mt. Hebron.

Bones of mothers
With wide hips
Strong backs
Bent to hoeing endless rows
To laundry cauldrons
Stretching lines of clothes
Sagging with blue jeans
Overalls and chambray shirts.
Fingers snapped beans
Wiped noses
Tickled ribs
Fingers sliced by cotton bolls
And folded in prayer.

Hard eyes
Sanded by haze and heat
Seared by summer suns
Saw too much of too little
Besought heaven for rain and blessing.
Eyes that said more than tongue allowed.

Broken hearts buried babies on this weedy knob.
Bodies lie here smelling of dirt and hogs
That knew the pleasures of moonshine and sweet tea
Bodies that cursed broken plows
And delighted in brush arbor revivals.

Bodies decay here that labored and loved
That knew night only as prelude to day.
Fathers and mothers moldering here
Whose sepia images burn behind my eyes.

Out where the sidewalk ends
Beyond the poplars and fences
On a hill salted by suns and stars
Lay the seeds of my inheritance
Whose budding I am.

In my veins their blood flows
Rivers of legacy
Refusing to die.

~~~~~

This post has it orgin in a small dusty graveyard in Greene County, Arkansas. My family has been interred here for more than a century. Hard-working share-croppers who lived lean lives with both joy and despair lay in that hard soil. Every time I visit I remember that the degree of separation between myself and them is not that great. They are who I am, and as much as I endeavor to grow, I am who they are.