Fighting to Protect Our Families and Our Lands!

Through out the campaign, I will post prose that represents the hollers of Appalachia we know best in HD 85.

Saturday, March 28

The Murmur

There’s a murmur moving through these hills,

and it is not the wind.

The dogs know it first,

throwing their voices against the ridge line

like the mountain answered back wrong.

Even the road feels tighter underfoot,

like it’s bracing.

It showed up at the courthouse steps,

folding chairs biting into marble dust,

coffee thinned to the color of creek water in August.

Men arguing about SNAP

like hunger is a stain that spreads on its own.

Arguing about women’s health-

they’ve never sat beside a pregnant twelve year old

trying to memorize algebra

between doctor’s appointments.

Preaching about vaccines

like we didn’t once chase down the greatest medical miracle and call it polio cured.

Women with Aitken’s Bibles tucked deep in their purses,

pages like decorative dish towels with gold trim,

verses about loaves and fishes

pressed between lipstick and receipts.

I hope they read the red letters slow.

You can feel it in the creek before it floods.

Water pulls itself close.

Sycamores flash their pale underarms.

Cows settle heavy in the pasture.

Even the crows hold their caw

like they know sound carries.

They talk about three strikes for mercy

as if grace keeps score.

They talk about who deserves clean water

in a state where wells run poison.

They shake hands in Charleston

while foster kids age out

with no family

and no porch light waiting.

I know an elderly woman

who fills milk jugs from her neighbor’s hose

because a hospital stay

turned her water bill into a cliff.

Her hands tremble in the cold

but she thanks him with cookies.

My Jesus is the neighbor with the spigot,

boots unlaced,

waving her over.

Not the utility company

stacking fees like firewood.

I know a man who met Narcan eight times.

Eight sharp blue mornings.

Eight returns from the edge of the creek bank

where the mud sucks at your heels.

Now he stands in church basements

under humming fluorescent lights,

telling the shaking ones

their names still matter.

Breath is not a sin.

Coming back is not weakness.

It is resurrection with track marks.

I know a woman who once counted SNAP dollars

at the Dollar General

with her chin lifted high.

Now she counts heartbeats.

Scrubs crisp as frost,

nursing degree framed on a paneled wall

that used to hold eviction notices.

Help was not her ending.

It was her bridge.

I know a child who eats on weekends

because neighbors in her holler

do not let cupboards echo.

There is always a pot of beans on low.

Cornbread sweating in a cast iron skillet.

A knock that sounds casual

but carries salvation in foil pans.

There’s a line at the food pantry

curving soft as the Elk River bend.

Nobody in it looks like a headline.

They look like us.

Boots dirty.

Hair pinned up with pencils.

Disabled.

The working poor.

Breath fogging in chemical valley air

that smells faintly of metal and prosperity.

So before you tell me

who’s worthy of bread

or breath

or one more chance,

come sit at this table.

Hear the door slap shut.

Tell them no yourself.

Eye to eye

And see if your voice shakes.

-Jenny Keener

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Palm Sunday

For The Dead of West Virginia, Still Waiting for a Better Day 

Our ancestors are sown into pocket graveyards  

throughout these mountains, private plots  

lucky to be mown monthly by some volunteer 

from the Presbyterian church or an inmate  

from the county jail. Their headstones lean  

into the hillsides, and they wait patiently, 

bony wrists crossed, for the new body  

they were promised from the pulpit 

as they sat aching on bare wood pews  

after six-day work weeks felling and barking 

timber, or killing and cooking chickens, or wielding  

a pick and shovel in a four-foot seam  

half-a-mile inside a mountain. This isn’t to say  

they didn’t know love and joy, that they didn’t  

revel in pleasure and play. They held their children 

in their laps, and sang loud and out of tune, and fought  

and laughed, of course, because that is the unkillable kernel  

at the heart of being human. But know this: they never knew  

any work that didn’t hurt, and they only ever worked  

because they had to, because there had to be a better life  

beyond this one. But there they lie, still moldering, still  

waiting, and maybe beginning to believe they were sold  

a bill of goods, and this hole is the only home they’ll ever know,  

from here on out, forever and ever, Amen. 

-Doug Van Gundy, Elkins WV

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------