Inspired Afterwards

Cherokee roots, mountain laurels, Tennessee waters, and two hundred year old gravestones, that I fancied as the graves of pirates, as one was barely chiseled “Captain”, and sticking menacingly half broken and crooked out of the forgotten ground; all gather together with the ghosts and glorious days of my youth. Like the dry flaked patch of red clay that we ceremoniously christened “The Battlefield”, as it was a scorched portion of the endless woods where nothing beautiful grew, being overgrown with sticker bushes and so called because we knew to our bones that Indians were buried there. And it was here that my dog Junie saved my life, by offering up hers, and saving us both. And all the steammy scorching windless days spent searching through freshly toiled soil, because it didn’t cost nuttin’, and there was no Nintindo, but we couldn’t have got one anyway, being from one of those hard working Alabama families whose kids roamed the neighborhoods like packs of wild dogs, playing “kick the can” and other games we'd make up from some newly cherrished discarded trash and imagination. And while walking down those long miles of tractor turned brown and red furrows, we'd find those cold and beautiful, few and far between, grey and white pieces of flint, perhaps worked by some distant indian kin into razor sharp arrowheads, knives, scrapers and stone axes once surely skillfully used to fell some green and fertile corner of the Alabama woods. And those many hot, warm and chilly Saturdays spent yelling “Roll Tide” as “The Bear” won yet another hard fought “three yards and a cloud of dust” football battle against some other Rebel or Yankee college team. And even the day when the man on the radio said that he had died. Even the day he said that Elvis had died. That day spent shoveling out pungent urin soaked horse stalls on Dieberts farm where I was the help, and never got closer to the beautiful saddlebred brown and chestnut beasts than when emptying those empty smelly stalls, laden with pitchfork and fresh straw. All of these memories and more float and hold the recesses of my mind appearing so clearly while wandering through the poems and writings of a poet named Tammy. A great poet, an inspiring poet, a poet whose wonderful words “kudzu” and “Cherokee” do what great poets do. They Inspire. They lift and lighten a weighted down soul and shine like the red gold orange of the sunrise, and comfort an old Alabama girl like the red Alabama clay itself. Like beautiful poetry always does. Always, even afterwards…