Southern Trail

Well, I’ve been working on the problem of having my poems available to you in an audio file. Maybe I’ve got it worked out.

The poem I’m sharing with you is called Southern Trail. It’s about the road where I lived in Kentucky. For hundreds of years the road had been a trail leading south from the Shawnee Indian lands in Southern Ohio, and continuing on toward the Cherokee lands in Tennessee.

Before I was born the trail had become a road into Kellen Hollow. Many years ago I read about the spring at the mouth of the hollow where a group of men were camped and attacked by the Shawnee with only one escaping.

My Grandfather built our house over that spring. The names of the people in the poem will not be known to many who do not know the history of that region. A wonderful book about that area is called, The Frontiersman by Allan W. Eckert. The three men mentioned were the heroes of the Ohio Valley, where I grew up.

Today the house is gone, the road has been paved, and the name has been changed. The only thing that remains is the Shawnee Spring, still coming from the hillside, still cool and clear.

Southern Trail

Remembering Kentucky,
the Kellen Hollow road,
my first steps there, dirty feet
on the way to the sycamore tree.

The Shawnee Spring had been there,
will be for another thousand years I suspect.
A resting place for Indian and white men
all. Was my first bath and drink,
joining their numbers.

Tecumseh, Kenton, Tygart,
all walked this way along the great trail.

I am just a poet, of no import,
but as a child, and as a man
I have always hoped that I would
someday meet them there
beside that dusty trail.

Poems About Home

It’s still raining in the mountains. My dirt road is a stream, and it’s chilly on the porch, so we’ll need to sit by the fire for our session today. All this is just not favorable for writing. Well, maybe it is, but I’ve written enough “dark and dreary” poems for now. Why don’t we just have a cup of tea and talk for a bit?

Have you noticed how many poems and stories there are about where we (writers) came from? I was born in Kellen Hollow in Eastern Kentucky, and when I was around seven we moved to the city. I spent the summers and holidays back roaming the Kentucky hills, and I have dear friends from that time still. I think about those times often, and most of my poems in Paths From the Shawnee Spring are from that era, and about the people I knew.

A friend of mine passed a week or so ago. He was one of those men who became your pal after you met him. I worked in his blacksmith shop in the summer with his son. Well, work is pushing it. I really just manned the broom and ran errands for him, and he fed me. It was a wonderful time, and what a treat to be there when the old men came and gathered around, and told stories about the river, town, and the old ways. Their stories still come to me as poems and prompts.

When the blacksmith shop closed he taught in an industrial arts setting, and did welding jobs to keep his family. He was a special person, and I will miss him.

You’ve known men and women just like him. They will feed your writings if you let them. They have so many stories to whisper to you. I was thinking about him this morning, and I have a poem to share that is about my friend Ellis, and others who went away to make a living, but always had a special love for home.

Kentuckians
for Ellis

How many of us crossed the Ohio for jobs and education,
ate in diners and beer joints while searching for our
own people; making little Kentucky communities
wherever we could? Always living in
South something,
West End something,
Lower something.

How many of us sat and told stories about home after
working double shifts at the shoe factories, or sweated
on assembly lines; used our last dollars for gas so we
could spend a few hours smelling honeysuckle and
visiting around the Sunday table,
before heading back north?

How many of us died in coal mines or driving
gravel trucks down snake-back roads so we could
hang onto a small piece of sacred mountain land
that our kin had fought to keep, after riding flat boats
down a river into the unknown?

How many of us would push the dirt off our faces,
stand up out of our graves, put on our boots and
do it all over again?

All of us who call ourselves Kentuckians would.


Robert W. Kimsey 2008