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At Ames Plantation
Grand Junction, Tennessee 1994
by Evelyn McAmis Bales

To this unfamiliar place you came,
child of green mountains
and swift flowing streams,
to make your own way
in a land of sluggish, brown rivers
and flat, black earth planted in cotton.

A land beautiful in its own way,
but I wonder how you will fare here
surrounded by such flatness,
where no mountain peak or rolling hill
rises to help you find yourself.

But you have learned your life's work here.
reading the digits of data loggers,
the rotation of soybeans and winter wheat,
plumbing the depths of ground water
to understand its way.

While I have learned the empty nest,
my heart reading pain and aching loss
as I plumb the depths of love to let you go,
my firstborn, flying into tomorrow
weaned of freshwater ponds
and hill country ridge and hollow.



First published in Kinkeeper, by Evelyn McAmis Bales, Finishing Line Press
 

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