Saving Words: (For Appalachian Poets)

Saving Words (For Appalachian Poets) Across the night waves cascade of disappearance their voices cast an arc, meet, reach to save the words, hold on, speak to thistledown adrift in dark: Wait, come back and touch the earth! They hear the owl suffuse his voice, and think themselves the first to share his plight. They grieve lost ground: Here was a road, here a redoubt on a ridge, there a boy from a mountain farm who reached to write his name across a crater of the moon. At the foot of Yonders Mountain they presume to sing, recalling a blind sweet presence telling the lyric past in plainsong 's lost refrain. They forge iron syllables to save the obsolete: a tailor's goose, a poulter's measure, a legend worn as prayer on fallen stone, their wistful voices sounding still old depths beneath the brickie air. -Dan Leidig 20 ...