Blood Knowledge

I am not

 

An old mountain woman

trapped by the circumstance

of poverty and the coal company’s

mudroad with the bottom out

and the sides off down the hill;

 

Don’t have hands started bleedin’

from haulin’ rocks before I was ten,

nor a heart that aches in winter

thinkin’ of a papa lost in some

black gassy-holed seam;

 

No way to claim the trap

of wallpaper peelin’ down,

linoleum cracked, and a tinroof leakin’

on a saggin ’ gray house

my man forgot to mend;

 

And there never was the torture

of babies comin ’ after I was some past forty

and had to dig steep acres

of potatoes in the hot-dust sun

offields we couldn’t even buy.

 

When I wake up cry in’, then,

I can’t use a borrowed reason

for pained cycles of struggle

layin’ claim to my body

and my battered head;

 

Only there’re times in

the godforsaken twilight all alone,

I too smother from feelin’ mostly dead

in a life whose surface rights

I don’t control or own;

 

Dispossessed, I wander

on a journey through stripped layers

of a mountain pass that never ends,

survivin’ on the old blood knowledge

shared deep with women kin;

 

So I hold to believin’ that there’re

spirit-rights, wise earth, sweet friends

transcend it all, recalling strength

that waits for each of us to use,

to never lose, to fiercely hold. . . .