A Kentucky Elegy

We didn’t bury only you.
We buried: First, family reunions,
pride, superstitions:
like “Don’t ever laugh in bed
or someone will die the next day.”

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Who jinxed us? The man who killed you
By stealing your walker? He’s a living joke, of course,
to think he could make you fall.

But also — we lost your sayings,
your mother’s (my namesake).

Gone is our matriarch, a farmer, reader,
a Kentucky town’s noble and early attempt at antiracism…

The stories you repeated to
“years,” unlistening — which is how you said “ears.”
It’s years we hear in now; you were right in saying so,
And you would have had one hundred this May.

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We will till the earth together, your children and theirs,
’til we find something of you again, unearthing it,
because in neither farming nor death
did dirt ever do you justice by covering you.

May you be exhumed in me somehow,
where the funereal wax melts off your hands, brown,
warm, living, holding mine.

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© Maggie McCombs 2024. All Rights Reserved.