
The end of the year always turns my thoughts to family, lineage and those who came before. A Joyful Noise- Root Music of the Heartland – the first in a series of “lineage poems,” words of origin and reflection, of receiving and giving. My parents, both born in the earliest part of the twentieth century (1915 and 1917,) met in a no-stoplight farm town in northwest Ohio. Bred of simple stock, firm in their protestant faith, the kind of belief that’s simply assumed, stitched into the fabric of a life.
Root Music
on my days alone, or late when the day’s light is going I can often hear their voices the thin black line of the old songs wavering like smoke above the fields the sad soul songs of simple white churches I can see old white women, the knotted hands of hard lives passed in good work of cold mornings and long days I can see old men bent stiff into their one black suit restless children, sitting on hard pews and harder teachings I was raised by voices planted in the flat black dirt of Ohio the granges and barns of a world expired now, when the sun has worn itself out and the heat of the land begins to fade I like to sit and listen as darkness falls listen to the birds settling home listen for the hymns as they begin to rise from the land listen to my own jagged life beginning to round © 2022 jafink/oldbonesnewsnow.com

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This sings to me.
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Thanks Jeff, the poem was wonderfully evocative.