We Keep Their Echoes With Us
A Tennessee poet guides us into a spring ritual, an old house, dreams of where we’ve been, and dreams of where we’ll be.
AIRING THE QUILTS
In hushed hills where time was woven slowly,
when the warmth of spring unfurled its embrace
and our yards awoke with the bees’ soft hum,
we took them off the beds and into the sun—
our mountain ritual of coming clean,
telling the whole truth about who we were,
showing all the world that we had survived
a cold winter blowing through the cracks
of a run-down place we’d still seen as grace.
On our backyard clotheslines, they fluttered
like multicolored prayers lifted skyward
on the mountain breeze in creation’s dance,
and we saw that they were not quite perfect,
mended and resewn through many long years
by hands that threaded lives into the scraps,
each one a kaleidoscope and an ode
to mothers and daughters and grandmothers,
who labored to hand down life’s patterns.
For this spring rite was as everlasting
to us as the return of green to the hills,
renewing all that would wave as emblems,
all that would never be gone or misplaced
because we’d kept it close to us each day,
airing the truth that it—and we—mattered.
OBSERVING THE REMAINS
In front of a weathered clapboard house,
four bearded irises stand in a row
like a family posed for a photo,
not bothering this spring to tack up
the faded heirloom quilt behind them
in this place now made of stillness.
The windows sit sigogglin, not plumb
with the planes of rough-hewn lumber.
The chimney of mountain rocks gaumed
with clay is a shambolic song of stone.
The white paint flakes away to expose
the gray moods of immemorial wood.
But this old house is a living presence,
like a granny who catches rainwater
in a barrel to store what’s worth saving,
standing as a beacon of memory
near a once-trodden footpath that leads
to a graveyard of castoff objects—
tarnished tin cans and old wheel spokes,
riddled wash pans and riven pots,
worn shoe soles and rusty bed springs,
busted crocks and Ball Mason jars—
all once used in life’s fluid motion,
lying now in the green ferns and the hush.
Seeing them here is funereally sad,
like standing over the dead once more,
the remains both gone and everlasting,
vacant footsteps in a clapboard house,
vestiges of a past departing our hills,
asking that we keep their echoes with us.
THE NEW CORN RIPPLES
like the waves of an ocean
he has never seen,
reflecting light in motion,
its leaves unfurling like sails,
each stalk a vessel moved
by currents under the earth
guiding the graceful sway,
and he, away from his family
and the farm he loves so well,
is trying to be somebody
more than just a child
of poverty and struggle
born in the Great Depression
in an Appalachian holler,
and he can only imagine it
as he can imagine the sea,
which he’s reading about
in Shakespeare and Coleridge,
the rustling whispers
of ancient tales sown
in the soil of new possibilities,
as his dormitory window
is flung ajar now to more
than academic buildings,
open to longing and promise,
open to loss and nostalgia,
dreaming of where he’s been,
dreaming of where he’ll be.
Danita Dodson is the author of two books of poetry, Trailing the Azimuth (2021) and The Medicine Woods (2022). She is a native of Sneedville, Tennessee, where she hikes in the hills of her ancestors and explores local history connected to the wilderness.
What lovely work! I love the images the quilts bring. Thank you!