Dirt Rich - A Poem by Selah Greer

Photo credit: Selah Greer

Beneath this soil, there is music.

The beat cradled in the bosom of ashen mountains,

Pounded out by tireless paths,

By the Cherokee stallion and the wagon train.

The soil’s stain passed down to my skin, 

the spirit of the untamed Indian burning beneath my eyes  

Beating out her path, bareback,

against the march of progress.

But the wheels still come, carve ruts into the hills,

The white man folds his stained soul into the waiting mountain-

An outlaw, running from a place far across deep waters.

The horse woman mixes her copper blood 

And they beat into the soil a new story.

The corn and potatoes reach toward a weeping sky

And the rain washes through the hemlocks.

The corn is plucked from the earth,

And fertile ground still holds the song that the seeds can hear,

But the beat of the drum echoes in the mountain's heart.

From fragile bodies seeps a crimson flood, 

A ruby river swelling as men march toward a black world 

Where a nation is unborn, unwound 

Into threads of blue and gray.

The mountain people seek the silence of the sleeping forest,

Choose the song of the soil and close their ears to beating drums.

But a kraken emerges from the blood river,

Steals sons who see skin only as a blanket for the blizzard

And pull them far beneath the melody they know.

Some never hear the hills again, 

But my blood finds a way back-

To the dirt and glass rivers, to my people and the frozen ground.

But the war had still crushed his bones in broken teeth.

Years painted valleys into his leathered face, 

His wounds into twisted scars, 

And the oak of his body eternally rooted in a wooden chair.

So the woman sang softly with the spirit of the mountain people, 

With the hills as she delicately unfurled the ground into survival,

Taking his place among the corn and the rising sun.

If the earth sang with her, she would hold her children

Tell them the story of the mountain, 

That being people of the dirt was never poor.

And when nature screamed back, she held tight to a dappled mare,

Bled into an inky night and brought new stories into the world.

In the fickle glare of homemade candles, she coaxed breath out of the womb 

And never once did she lay her handiwork into the soil’s waiting arms.

The mountain's gift to her, she knew.

A whispered blessing from the ground she worshiped

To bring forth life far from the shadow of death. 

Her hands tired after many winters,

But held fire enough to take the shadows hand with no fear

And be led into its shade, perpetual sleep.

Her song cascades through the spring river, 

Clear as the eyes of the moon when it cries many long years later.

The tears shine when her son holds them in his hand,

Guiding the celestial sadness into a rusted still.

Find him in the pine, the hemlock, the rhododendron, 

No order is found in such woods, no law can find the trail he follows,

Nor the song he hums in tempo with the drip of moonshine into his wife's mason jar, 

Into the dampening dirt, into the sky, a bated breath of crystalline vapor.

When the moon’s tears become ice and secrete the copper pipes,

He brings the forest by the hearth, 

Strips pine flesh into a wooden wagon the size of his fist.

The wagons were what brought my people here,

He whispers as he places it into his child's arms.

The woman ties scraps into a masterpiece, 

One to hold back the lurking cold of that December,

And a blind man with a banjo 

Appears like an apparition in the rough wind, at their door.

The soil may be covered with snow, but it always listens,

Stealing the banjo, the rhythm of pounding feet, into its song.

The ground eventually awakens, shrugs off the weight of slush-

An unwanted guest lingering too long in the deep shade of the holler.

A boy runs through the expanse of mud, broken by occasional color-

Daffodils praying to a vague notion of spring on the breeze,

A faded ribbon twisting on the sunken cedar porch.

Thunder shakes into the earth, 

Small feet shake a song into the valley.

He runs toward a weathered rock, 

The other boys chasing a baseball in the weeds.

Wet dirt fills his lungs, but he is safe, he is home.

Where the creek washes his clothes and his sweat 

Under the precious summer moon,

Where the sun dips behind the hill far before stars are born,

Where his father speaks of a brown woman, bareback, 

Pounding her rhythm into the ground

An outlaw, a war, a woman with beautiful hands,

A carpenter with the voice of an angel

Who stole the very light of the moon.

The boy listens, remembers the story of his blood 

As he scrubs the university floor, black and gold.

In the Watauga hospital, under yellowing fluorescent light 

He whispers his story to a barely formed boy in his arms,

Many moons cross the sky before my grandfather whispers the story to me.

But he need not speak, 

For the ground holds no secrets from her children,

The mountain sings the song of my people to me.