My People

My people

Could have come straight

From

A Faulkner novel

The generations that came

Before me

Were rugged

Denim wearing folks

Logging timber out

Of

Florida’s backwater swamps

Making moonshine

In the Appalachian Foothills

Sitting up all night

With the dead

Before laying them to rest

In the sandy soil of small-town

Southern cemeteries

Shaded with cedars

And

Longleaf pines!

My people were  

Truck drivers

Farmers

Factory workers

War heroes

Parolees

And

Preachers

They doctored themselves

Because

They couldn’t afford

Going

To a doctor

Or the medicine prescribed

Afterwards!

They clotted

Bleeding wounds

With spider webs

Drew poison out

With tobacco

Relieved toothaches

With honey

And

Chest colds

With camphor tree leaves!   

Yes

My people could’ve come

From a Faulkner Novel

Or

Maybe something

Flannery dreamed up! 

From my book, When The Cedars Shade Your Grave

Flannery O’Connor

I had a dream the other night

I was a little boy again

Standing outside of my home

I could hear peacocks

Calling in the distance

On a farm

A few fields away from mine

This was a common sound

Growing up

The high pitch screech of peacocks

Traveling through the wind

Through the trees

Across wild grasslands 

From a neighbor’s back yard

These brightly colored birds would cry

Throughout the day

Yet, now I was dreaming

These peacocks

No longer belonged to my neighbor

But were Flannery O’Connor’s birds of song

Singing sweet songs she is gone

For

These blue crushed velvet dream birds

With their pinwheel of feathers 

Miss her words as much as I do

Her tales of the unwanted, for our enjoyment

The dispossessed, for our entertainment

The excluded, to make us think to include others

The outcast, to question if we’re really on the inside 

The killers, to make us look twice at a stranger

With her words

She made us ponder all of these things

While we watched her characters

Casting their nets

Their way of life

Upon the world

I awoke to hear the birds no more

And realized 

Anything is possible in a dream

All of it is real

As long as we are asleep