Homage to Appalachia

This new video attempts to express our wistful homage to Appalachia.  Dan and I have lived here among the Blue Ridge Mountains 

longer than in any other place — so long now that we no longer feel like outlanders from the flatlands of the Midwest!

But to create this film, I needed some authentic barn imagery.  So I asked Bristol artist Val Lyle — admired for her own exhibits paying 

homage to the tobacco barns of Appalachia — for permission to use two of her paintings that appear in the second segment of the video, 

after my own mountain and cicada images.    

                                                                                                                                                                                          --Suzanne

[To learn more about Val, visit  www.vglyle.com]

"Appalachian Spirit"

          

_________________________________________________________________________________

   Appalachian Spirit

   Strolling parched hills
    in late August

        I come upon husks

                           of cicadas . . .

                    Past molting

       they cling hollow to the scaly

            bark of pines;

      shaped like

empty alms bowls,

            those bowed & brittle

ghost-spoors

      that once bore

      the secret of  

      flight.

                  

Life’s fragile pulse

allures me

          all the time.

                         It beckons

             like abandoned shacks

of lost tobacco-farms

passed on the

                        Interstate,

     slumped by their rust-

     crowned barns . . .

                   so tranquil now

            & timeless,

like the rest of the world

unfolding

            before it falls

                              away.

                                    Southwest Virginia

 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Appalachian Spirit” was first published (under the title “Fading Spirits”) in the Appalachian Journal [ASU], Boone, NC.  

The present version is forthcoming in Back to the Source: Selected Poems & Parables (San Francisco Bay Press, 2015).