A POET'S WORK

By Jane Hicks

"The aim of the poet and the poetry is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual work in to the larger work of the community as a whole." Seamus Heaney

For Jeremy Davidson* 2001-2004

Spare me the post-modern pout about dog piss in the gray snow near the subway entrance,

Or the academic angst over a shaft of light like the one in a scriptorium of an obscure Tuscan monastery.

Witness meth labs that spring up in our rural gardens, a quick pay out or fuel for three piddly jobs, two to live, one to pay daycare.

Recount farm foreclosure, our food modified, altered atrocities, the domain of agribusiness conglomerates, the family farm a curiosity.

Clutch the child who sobs silently, her mama a nurse in the Guard, called up, goodnights from a webcam image from Basra.

Behold mountaintops removed, laid low by greed, hollows filled, wells poisoned, God's majesty flattened, fit only for Wal-Mart, the new Ground Zero.

Support the woman who tosses in fitful sleep as a dozer strips her mountains under cover of dark, who wakes to thunder, boulders tumbled upon her baby in his bed.

Revile the judgment of life's worth in coal country, a fine levied at fifteen thousand, less than the price of a good pickup truck, how the law measures a baby's life.

Spare me the post-modern pout, the academic angst. Travel ruined roads, moonscape mountains, failed farms and ponder judicial disregard, mindful of a poet's work, the naming of what matters.

* Jeremy Davidson was killed by a boulder that plunged over 600 feet from a strip mine on the top of the Black Mountain and crashed through the side of his family's home in Inman, Virginia. It drove his crib through the floor of his family's home.

Jane Hicks is poet, teacher, and quilt artist from "upper East Tennessee." Her first collection of poetry, Blood and Bone Remember (Jesse Stuart Foundation, 2005) won the Appalachian Writers Association Poetry Book of the Year and was nominated for the Weatherford Award given by the Appalachian Studies Association.