Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Sunset Mountain Testimony--I

How the wind rules these mountains.

How it turns the trees
   on the lathe of its will.

How it polishes the stone
   to smoothness, to nothing.

How time and the wind
   cut trails through the pines
   and the saplings were
   tramped down in the footfall
   of rabbit fleeing and fox pursuing
   and rivulets of water seeking.

How the trails were followed
   by someone's cow, a wagon, a jeep
and a dirt road that grew into a highway.

Mrs. Edwards

"Sarah was always the special one, not that there was anything wrong
with Rachel Leah Ruth or Elijah Samuel or John for that matter,
Sarah was the one we knew was touched by some hand before birth
so I guess it was no surprise when she woke up that morning saying
she had seen something too beautiful to be from here in Cu'nelia
or made by any hand for that matter it was made of light

it was light she said, come through the window
   in the middle of midnight,
pierced her she said pierced her right through,
she was pierced by the light and we knew
we needed to listen to her after that, pierced by the light

her little body not twelve years, the boys not even
   looking at her yet
when she walked down the road swinging a co'cola
and then they never looked after word got out
because she had been pierced by the light
pierced through leaving something of itself in her little body
so that she said those things we would have thought sheer fool
craziness but for the light in her eyes, those things about
money being poor commerce for love, the food
hollow of love, empty of love and she stopped eating
even the sweet potatoes she liked so much and then
the day the drought got so bad the crops dried up
and the cows and we all went to her

what is it Sarah how do we make the rain come
and you know the rest how she just smiled and then the blood
happened on her hands and on her feet so much blood from
that little body and then she was gone never sick a day
in her sweet life but gone

and we buried her by the spring, you know the rest
how it rained, but I would give it all give all the earth
for one more of her songs, one smile,
but that is not ours to trade,
we live by what is given to us
and what light shines and what rain falls on us
and that is how we are farmers I guess."

Cabin Window

"Today a squirrel come by here and looked in through the window where it's empty. Knew better. This my house. Lem'l built it for me when we were the only two on this mountain and me the only one in his life. Only had glass for one window but he built it straight and true and I made the curtains from my weddin' dress. Kept this place pretty and neat. Clean. Like I kept myself. Every day he'd come in to buttermilk and cornbread and a place clean and right. Every day. Until the day he run off with that girl from town her all laughter and colors and smells and mess. Everything in me that was summer and lilac went to coal dust and arsenic. I threw down the pots and spilled the milk. Broke out the window glass. Two three six of them before I got my right mind and stopped. I cleaned up real good and fixed a special supper. Sat down and never got up again. Now only the wind violates us. Comes in here laughing all stupid and whips the curtains about. The little mouse who lived behind the cupboard and the spiders and even the ants they all left. They knew. And you lookin' in here. You knew, didn't you? Knew it wasn't about the wood and the glass and the broken places. Knew to look beyond. To look through. Knew it was about what was inside. It is all about what is inside."

Kittens

"Grandma said she used to be the one
stuck with drowning the kittens, put 'em
in a bag with some rocks and toss it over,
then run to get away before they let out
that last frightened mew.
She said she never could run fast enough."

My head's just an old bag of words
you're tired of hearing.

Lake Lanier

When God began to create the heaven
and the earth--the earth being unformed
and void, with darkness over the surface
of the deep and a wind from God
sweeping over the water.
                     -- Genesis 1:1

Always there was the water
and the wind that some call
the Spirit or God's breath,
only later the land

that invited families
to build and farm
and stay until the day
the Corps of Engineers Flooded
the farmland, expelling people
who had not moved those many years.

I imagined their homes
empty, shrouded, dissolving
beneath Lanier, with catfish,
bass and bream
nosing about the rooms
where children played
and eventually died;

fish in a world limited not by
tank or net but by water
and the absence of water beyond.

These things have troubled me for so long
that now they are a part of me.

Lake Rabun

-- Psalm 121:1 ("I will lift up mine eyes unto
the mountains, from whence cometh my help")
as translated into Cherokee, wall of the
Community Center, Franklin, North Carolina 

I watched when your people came.
They hung lights in the trees.
They built big fires they thought to control.
I watched them build wooden lodges.
I watched the lodges burn.
Only stones were left, stacked
like the stones on their graves
or fingers pointing to the sky.
The stones watch with me.

You moved them on as they moved us.
You brought the water.
Your people fished and played.
Your young girls surrendered in the shadows.
Their mouths were full of honey and don't tell don't tell.
Gotvdi, fire, awakened in them, and they cried.

Listen! Life smolders in the earth
waiting to inflame the sky.
It was always here. Listen!

Your people go away in the fall.
They return in spring.
The earth awaits them."

Barry Marks practices law in Birmingham, Alabama. His poetry has appeared in Folio, The Lyric, Black River Review, The Jewish Spectator, WordWrights!, Aura, Amaryllis and Calliope. He is a past President of the Alabama State Poetry Society and was named Alabama's Poet of the Year for 1998. Marks frequently participates in poetry readings and spoken word events.
"Mrs. Edwards" first appeared in Wordwrights!