Mountain Bound: Patterson Gap Poetry, #2

By Daniel Warren

Patterson Gap Poetry: Book 2

 

Mountain Bound is about inspiration and coming home. It's about southern mountains and mystery and the longing to live beyond the cares and clashes of modernity. It's a bluegrass of poems on man, nature and metropolis and place and land, especially in the south.

 

Sample:

Seasonal turnings

 

She's long lived / as a farmer's / wife

She's gotten used / to his rhythms / in her life

 

His rhythms / were seasonal turnings / planting to harvesting to a fallow fall

Especially a fallow fall / when he kicked the barren soil / and stared straight ahead and far away

 

But she was a good wife / she prepared and repaired / she cleaned and she dreamed

They both dreamed, / through years that brought / days when despair was all they had

 

And quiet mercies / dropped from their lives / like the last leaves of autumn

When he left / the harvest was in / and she busily prepared

 

The canning of the final fruits / of his labor that would see /her through the spring

When seasonal turning / would bring to her / change.

 

See the blogspot Tumbledown Hall or Patterson Gap Poetry for more poems and author posts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Warren
• Release date: Aug 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201003111

Book preview

DEDICATION

––––––––

To Sarah

Surely place induces poetry, and when the poet is extremely attentive to what is there, a meaning may even attach to his poem out of the spot on earth where it is spoken, and the poem signify the more because it does spring so wholly out of its place, and the sap has run up in it as a tree.

––––––––

Eudora Welty

TURKEY PEN RIDGE

Appalachians

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Twice-built mountains

thrust faulted

into the sky

––––––––

Eroded to nothing

in the Mesozoic

––––––––

Uplifted again

by the Cenozoic

––––––––

Ridge runners

and valleys

rock outcrop

on clay

––––––––

Brooks and branches

streams and standing

pools empty

into the rivers

Cumberland and Tennessee

––––––––

How high

Rabun and Brasstown

––––––––

How high

Clingman's and Big Frog

––––––––

How high

Mitchell, Grandfather and Cold

––––––––

A bed

of conifer needles

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A coat

of Fraser fir

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A floor

of Holly leaf

and tuliptree

oak, chestnuts

and hickory

––––––––

A gathering

of blueberries

and blackberries

huckleberries

and tea

––––––––

Abode

of tree squirrel

and cottontail

wolf, cougar, beaver

and bear

––––––––

Abode

of fox, coyote

and woodchuck

and white-tail deer

––––––––

Sight the

wild-turkey

owl and mourning dove

raven and red-tailed hawk

––––––––

Sight the

garter, rat

and copperhead

on the mountain path

you walk

––––––––

Folded mountains

thrust-fault mountains

uplift mountains

Appalachian mountains all.

––––––––

Talking mountains

who will listen?

––––––––

Walking mountains

who goes there?

––––––––

Questions we value

are always answered

if we listen

in the Appalachian

mountain air.

Into the air

––––––––

The stairs climb

into the air

no second floor

was there

––––––––

The house

abandoned, half-demolished

a monument to more.

––––––––

The family

bought out

by a government

––––––––

That planned

to bring electricity,

just not to them

––––––––

And not to there,

their past would

likely disappear

––––––––

Their future

would likely

be no more than

a signature

on a government

document.

––––––––

The house azaleas

in proliferation that spring

not tended and

not intended to

survive

––––––––

The bird feeders

not fed

would empty of birds

but fill with the depths

of the new lake

––––––––

Named not for