when the raw, oozing hives that
covered ninety-eight percent of our bodies
from the sprays ordered by the FDA
and spread by landowners,
before anyone had seen
automated machines that top and prime.
While we topped the lavender
blooms of many tiny flowers
gathered into one, gorgeous.
By grasping hold below the petals
with our bare, calloused hands
and twisting downward, quick, hard,
only one time, snapped them off.
Before edgers and herbicides took
what they call weeds,
when we walked for days
through thirty acres and
chopped them out with hoes.
Hoes, made long before from wood and steel
and sometimes (even longer ago)
from wood and deer scapula.
Before the bulk primers came
and we primed all the leaves by hand,
stooped over at the waist for the
lower ones and through the season
gradually rising higher until we stood
and worked simultaneously,
as married to the fields as we were to each other,
carrying up to fifty pounds of fresh
leaves under each arm and sewing them onto
sticks four feet long on a looper
under the shade of a tin-roofed barn, made of shingle,
and poking it up through the rafters inside
to be caught by a hanger who
poked it up higher in the rafters to another
who held a higher position
and so they filled the barn.
And the leaves hung down
like butterfly wings, though
sometimes the color of
luna moths, or Carolina parakeets, when just
an hour ago they had been
laid upon the old wooden
cart trailers pulled behind
the orange Allis-Chalmers tractor
with huge round fenders and only
a screwdriver and salt in the toolbox.
Picked by primers so hot
we would race through the rows
to reach the twenty-five gallon
jugs of water placed throughout
the field to encourage and in attempt to
satisfy our insatiable thirsts
from drinking air which poured
through our pores without breaking
through to our need for more
water in the Sun.
Sun we imagined to disappear
yet respected for growing all things on earth
when quenched with rains called forth
by our song and drumming.
Leaves, which weeks later, would be
taken down and the strings pulled
like string on top of a large dog food bag
and sheeted up into burlap sheets
that bundled over a hundred pounds
when we smashed down with our feet,
then thrown up high to
a catcher on a big clapboard trailer
pulled behind two-ton trucks and
taken to market in Fuquay-Varina
and sold to Philip Morris and
Winston-Salem for around a buck a pound.
Leaves cured to a bright leaf,
a golden yellow with the strongest
aroma of tobacco barn-curing
and hand-grown quality
before the encroachment of
big business in the Reagan era
and the slow murder of method
from a hundred years before.
When the loons cried out in
laughter by the springs and
the bass popped the surface on
the pond, early on, next to
the fields, before that time
when it was unfashionable to
transplant each individual baby plant,
the infant tobacco we nurtured, to
transplant those seedlings to each hill
in the field, the space for that particular plant
and we watched as they would grow.
Before all of this new age, new way,
I was a sharecropper in Willow Springs, North Carolina
as were you and we were proud to be Tsa la gi
wishing for winter so we could make camp
at Qualla Boundary and the Oconaluftee River
would be free of tourists and filled with snow
and those of us who held out forever
and had no CIBs would be home again
with our people, while the BIA forgot to watch.
When we still remembered before even the Europeans,
working now shoulder to shoulder with descendants
of their slaves they brought from Africa
when they sold our ancestors as slaves into the Middle East,
that then the tobacco was sacred to all of us and we
prayed whenever we smoked and
did not smoke for pleasure and
I was content and free.
Then they came and changed things
and you left me for a fancy white girl
and I waited on the land
until you brought her back
in that brand-new white Trans Am,
purchased from our crop, you gave her
and left her waiting in a motel,
the nearest one was forty miles away,
but near enough for you
and for her and I knew though
I never spoke a word to you
about it, I knew and I kept it to
myself to this day and time and
I never let on
until I left on our anniversary.
I drove the pickup
down the dirt path by the empty fields
and rented a shack for eighty dollars,
the one with cardboard windows
and a Gillespie house floor design,
with torn and faded floral paper on walls
and linoleum so thin over rotted board
that the floor gave if you weighed over
a hundred pounds, I did not.
The one at hilltop, where I could
see out across all the fields
and hunt for meat when I wanted
and find peace.
I heard you remarried
and went into automated farming
and kept up with America.
I watched all of you from the hill
and I waited for the lavender blooms
to return and when it was spring
even the blooms had turned white.
I rolled up my bedroll, remembering before,
when the fields were like waves on a green ocean,
and turned away, away from the change
and corruption of big business on small farms
of traditional agricultural people, and sharecroppers.
Away, so that I could always hold this concise image
of before that time and it
floods my memory.
FROM Blood Run
Skeletons
All that is good is with us—
remains in subtle dusk,
holds the base of lifetimes.
We belong here. Let us be.
Do not unsettle us.
Do not bring harm, nor further journey.
We have finished with this world,
have returned to it.
Until there is dust we must remain
settled here where we were lain.
Our People labored for this honoring
no human
should dismantle prayer.
Ghosts
When all the doghair, squirreltail, foxtail,
porcupine, buffalo, pony grasses run
impression strummed,
along slopes, gradient rise—
When Mullein presses low,
red willow limbs quiver, whirlwinds shiver,
release silver-spotted skippers,
monarchs, white butterflies
take to wing, to firmament—
lifting miracle commotion,
phenomena now we.
In translucency of leaves,
overcast sun, rolling,
lightening, shadowing breadth of green—
In this acuity, this keenness
Insight pronounces utterances
not unlike prophesy.
For those who heed, prefigure, perceive.
For those who distinguish
modern from manifest,
in everything all familiar.
We will have beckoned you to return to us,
return our skeletal remains to shelter here,
return our longing.
Then, in quiet whispering,
momentary stillness reveals.
Skeletons
Just yesterday some of us returned home.
Away from archeological scholar filings,
home where we should have always lain.
Just yesterday before, we were still live.
In the time passed while life developed
our framework, fully cultivated casing,
while structure of our statures discerned,
we were perceived as one with The People,
now possess mere remnants of all we were,
souls passed, relative to all surround.
We still stand the test, uphold each,
every essential instrument of life as it exists.
Still relishing essences, tastes, hours of humankind,
await opportunity to sleep, to sleep, to sleep, to sleep.
FROM Streaming
We Were in a World
We were in a world, in a world, in a world. Sure, we had our glyphs, but we were providential. Once, some alphabet believers, glass purveyors, Ursus Arctos killers, sent all bailiwick on cursed course far faster gyration backspin, birling intrinsic angular momentum—boson melts. Spinning, it careened away iceberg, iceberg, iceberg; glacier braced time traced yesterday unshakable base—all below flushed alluvion torrent, Niagara pour, special spate, flux, flow, until their coastal citadels moldered from cyclone, tsunami, hurricane gale. Tornadoes tossed turf wherever they pleased. Eruptions molded Her back into something She deemed worthy. Not to mention quakes. And the people, the people, the People, pushed into cataclysm, a few generations from alphabet book imposed catechism, soon were calamity tragedy storm splinters, fragmented particles of real past, in a world gone away from oratory, song, oraliteratures, orations into gyrations reeling. Soon hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. Hot, dying mangroves, disappearing Waimea Bay, Dengue fever, butterfly range shift, meadow gone forest, desert sprung savannah, caribou, black guillemot, bats, frogs, snails—gone. What will Sandhill Cranes crave? Winged lay early. Reefs bleach. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, snow, snow, snow, fires flaming fiercely, fascinated in their own reflecting glare. Marmots rise early. Mosquitoes endure longer, lasting biting spreading West Nile. Polar bears quit bearing. Robins, swallows, enter Inuit life. Thunder finds Inupiat. Here, it is said, glyphs left rock wall, stone plates, bark, branch, leapt animated into being, shook shoulders, straightened story, lifted world upon their wing bone, soared into Night, to place World back into socket eased sky—stilled us. Some say the soup leftover was worded with decolonized language. Some say the taste lingers even now.
America, I Sing You Back
for Phil Young and my father Robert Hedge Coke;
for Whitman and Hughes
America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.
Sing back the moment you cherished breath.
Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.
Before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep,
held her cradleboard, wept her into day.
My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery,
held her severed cord beautifully beaded.
My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps,
nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong.
My song comforted her as she battled my reason
broke my long-held footing sure, as any child might do.
As she pushed herself away, forced me to remove myself,
as I cried this country, my song grew roses in each tear’s fall.
My blood-veined rivers, painted pipestone quarries
circled canyons, while she made herself maiden fine.
But here I am, here I am, here I remain high on each and every peak,
carefully rumbling her great underbelly, prepared to pour forth singing—
and sing again I will, as I have always done.
Never silenced unless in the company of strangers, singing
the stoic face, polite repose, polite while dancing deep inside, polite
Mother of her world. Sister of myself.
When my song sings aloud again. When I call her back to cradle.
Call her to peer into waters, to behold herself in dark and light,
day and night, call her to sing along, call her to mature, to envision—
then, she will quake herself over. My song will make it so.
When she grows far past her self-considered purpose,
I will sing her back, sing her back. I will sing. Oh I will—I do.
America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.
POETICS STATEMENT
Quipu: a poetic
Life’s a tangle. Serendipitous symphonic reverb splintering strike set amplified acoustic wail we wind through. Narrows split with stone spines, hefting unintelligible weight, shucking confluence keen. Each temporal knot testimony to measuring up, mustering, true mettle, making malleable every juncture cinched up and thrown down. You want to breathe? Make it worthy. Make it tag dawn like Morning Star’s sudden transitory entry from the vault to evanescent clutch of night.
My mind hosts a radio. Songs sail around smooth internal waves, roll rapids, still rash, and somewhere in there the music platforms each cognition.
Sparks flash fire, slash ruminations, sash up, stitch / seam ready. Chords cord, twine-like, sinew, snap out releasing quick light display easing into language pertinent to whatever culled calls for, and then the work, making.
What’s the muster?
Growing, cracker packing, weaving, fast food slinging, soft serve service, waiting tables, landscaping, soundscaping, cultivating, sharecropping tobacco and sweet potatoes, migrant fieldwork, fruit picking, horse breaking, dog training, wrecking foundations, demolition, heavy equipment operation, carpentry, commercial fishing, night auditing, bar keeping, letting go, leaving, mourning, lobbying, organizing, shortchanging suicide, wrangling violence, interchanging abilities / lack thereof, cultivating life, dreaming—built earth, bird councils, canoeing, swimming, singing, story, play, place, prayer, peace, protecting—
Laboring, it’s been with us. Some of Dad never left the cotton patch, the creek, dust, the war. Some of Mom never left Chief Mountain, Lake Louise, Toronto Inglis (War) Factory, or any one of many asylums. Me, way deep in tobacco leaf, somehow. Curved by every fold of mountain, skim of stream, by each single borne aggression laid out on me and every sliver of hope graced within. We are what we’ve been made of, the mountains, rivers, streams, and all the plants and creatures ever handled by our bodies. What we’ve been through. Story / culture equation we know as life, sometimes rife with sheared endeavor. Sometimes so ultimately genuine, gorgeous, brilliant, no matter what went on the taste of it overrides, gives us reason, makes us amend, correct, brings purpose.
Lessons learne
d.
If something’s wrong, broken, do something about it, fix it. If you need something done, make it happen. Do it yourself, don’t be a burden to anybody else. Help others. Build community. Be the glue. Learn and share what you gather. Remember where you’ve come from, who we are, what we do. Bring all of it forward to help out those coming. Give the future a solid past, a proper stone to grow from and return to. Time is fleeting and only what we make of it. Get to it.
If you speak, make it meaningful. If you write it, fill it with meaning that will work beyond the time any control is in your own hands.
Nights warmed by children, elders, ditch dogs, slinking cats. Mornings lifted with cranesong amid hundreds of thousands of rising wings, on lands populated for tens of thousands of generations of story / song living. Leftover platitudes overlay dense spectrum of significance from knowings, from seeking people have curated and kept for eons. This place, unlike any other, until you find the heat of it, the crevice, there, deep in the cradle we’re held in, pictograph lined, stacked earth lain, cherished, attributed, loved. Makes language what it need be in the source, the beat, heart / hoof drumming. Rides down cliff edge, split turn 180° on iced Hamburger Hill, forty below. Rabbit punched. Hospitalized. Raped. Crushed car mangled matter. Malnourished. Malignancies. Defects at birth. Resuscitated at birth, in anaphylactic reactions, in sugar fits, in seizures. You don’t even want to know the most of it. The real there. Go ahead, think it’s been easy. Makes a good story that way. I’ll smile and go with you until I drop in truth, punctuate that. Fostering, you name it, we’ve been there. So many of us here speaking the sound escapes from sewer caps straight down the rain glistened street ghosts shimmer.
Loss, what we had, most of it. Most of who we loved, especially loves of life.
Me, just a slight slice of the greater. We, is where it’s at. Collectively considered.
So it goes. The poems filtrate sediment congested leveling life and give it new breath. They are the breath. The inhale / exhale of composition. Counting every syllable until the music fits and concept is rested.
RESURRECTING THE SERPENT, REACTIVATING GOOD EARTH
Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run
Chadwick Allen
Alongside Big Sioux River, a Missouri tributary, at
the site formally called Blood Run, now Good
Earth, a twin of the serpent mound in Ohio once