Hacking a Trail

The move had somehow
hacked a trail
back to my past;
and my ancestral longing
for a Papa, like Mary Ingram’s,
and a Mama who could
stay at home and cure all my ills.
The miserable, wet heat,
somehow,
fell like a reminder
of those early summer vacations
in rural Georgia;
going to the spring
and lugging the pail
up the hill
to Christine’s,
or Aunt Tish’s kitchen
with its bare essentials;
cooking up a scant meal,
the smell of which
was heady with fatback and beans
and cornbread for soakin’.
The crust was always
grainy, gritty and crisp.

The move had taken me somewhere
into a geography
of the mind,
all grainy and gritty
and troublesome.
Life was always hard
with someone’s lost dreams
hanging heavy over me.

-Joy S. Barefoot, Mississippi
(written after moving to Mississippi, 2001, feeling so much like Georgia)