Poetry - Listen -David Hightower
free verse - Americana - Appalachian -
history - nature -

LISTEN
Moundbuilders,
shrouded in silence,
crouch in pyramid tombs by the river.
Their hands clutch fists of earth.
I hear them in the water’s mist,
still building.

Proud Creeks dressed for war
lie silent now.
They dream of darting tree shadows
and wild feathers flying.
The crows remember,
tell the old tales and cry the war cries.

Cherokees, praising valleys
with fields of corn,
gambled their future on the new law,
were planted anyway in strange lands.
The whippoorwill moans at distant dusk
and sings the loneliness of lost homes.

New people measured off the earth,
drew a dark line in the dust.
Brothers bled when it was crossed.
Ranks of stone mark their passing.
Crickets count their numbers endlessly
on hot summer nights.

Slaves celebrating in broad daylight
found freedom not so easily gained,
so treasured that which could not be taken away.
They lie uneasily in nameless holes.
The night breeze through pines
whispers like hymns their human hopes.

We, the mixed threads and remnants
of those long gone,
weave our own change of days
and wonder at the familiar echoes
in this our home,
haunted place of mountains, rivers, trees;
where paradise sits on warm spring days
and whistles from a nest of old bones.