The Appalachian Book of the Dead

From Rain on the Cumberlands

Rain in the beechwood trees. Rain upon the wanderer

Whose breath lies cold upon the mountainside,

Caught up with broken horns within the nettled grass,

With hooves relinquished on the breathing stones

Eaten with rain-strokes.

From Hounds on the Mountain

Hounds on the mountain ....

Grey and swift spinning the quarry shall turn

At the cove’s ending, at the slow day’s breaking,

And lave the violent shadows with her blood.

From Graveyard

There is no town so quiet on any earth,

Nor any house so dark upon the mind.

Only the night is here, and the dead

Under the hard blind eyes of hill and tree.

Here lives sleep. Here the dead are free.

From Horseback in the Rain

To the stone, to the mud

With hoofs busy clattering

In a fog-wrinkled spreading

Of waters? Halt not. Stay not.

Ride the storm with no ending

On a road unarriving.

From Spring on Troublesome Creek

Not all of us were warm, not all of us.

We are winter-lean, our faces are sharp with cold

And there is the smell of wood smoke in our clothes;

Not all of us were warm, though we have hugged the fire

Through the long chilled nights.

From Mountain Dulcimer

The dulcimer sings from fretted throat

Of the doe’s swift poise, the fox’s fleeting step

And the music of hounds upon the outward slope

Stirring the night, drumming the ridge-strewn way.

From Child in the Hills

Where on these hills are tracks a small foot made,

Where rests the echo of his voice calling to the crows

In sprouting corn? Here are tall trees his eyes

Have measured to their tops, here lies fallow earth

Unfurrowed by terracing plows these sleeping years.

Poem: Stanza's from James Stills, "From the Mountains, from the Valley" 

Scrimshaw: Pending...