My dear friend I woke up this morning and the sky was stifling tears I hoped it would cry for you I knew you had planted a whole field yesterday tucked your hopes and good humor into tired ground so overworked that it blew away with a breath of the noon wind If only the day would give you a chance to grow something to show for your sweat I was never born a farmer but my callused fingertips recognize the loamy feeling of the world keeping a secret under its skin and the shy desire to discover it I know how to mean well and fuck it up anyway If only the sky would confess and the seeds grow The clock on the nightstand begged me to close my eyes and lose myself in sleep but is the day still night if you call it that? Is a stranger still friend if you call it that? *** eKY Flood Relief Annotation 8/8/22 I want so badly for my friends to succeed. I remember discovering this skeleton of a building for the first time with a local friend, listening to their cultural vision echo within the tattooed walls. How many other dreamers sidestepped the same holes in this concrete while building hypothetical futures aloud? Could believing in the greatness of what is still yet to come be a communicable condition? I wonder if the people who would come to this place after us could hear our voices resonating... or if not our voices, our hope? This poem is for all the folks out there who plant seeds of hope and goodness around them with no way of telling if anything will grow. I've known so many Appalachians with an artists' sensitivity and an activists' self-sacrificial instinct. Living legends. Support these precious people as they labor restlessly to hold their communities above floodwaters: https://tinyurl.com/ekyfriends Return to the Kentucky Collection.
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