North Carolina Literature and the Other Arts
N C L R ONLINE
27
BY KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER
Communion
Come evening the earth lifts her spirits, freed from the workaday odors of gasoline, motor oil, sweat, and the inexorable coil of exhaust from the highway beyond her breath’s provenance.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG PITTS; COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
She breathes forth the truth of her burial grounds where her potsherds have waited for lifetimes to be found, her snake skins, the bones of her numerous deer slain, the bloodbath of hogs I, her daughter, watched butchered each fall from the safety of back porch. Her veins, varicose as my grandmother’s, pulsate with origins, season by season becoming the wild native yeast of her landscape, its kneading of weather and soil bringing increase or famine. Come evening I stand on my side of the barbwire, inhaling her risings, my hands lately lifted from oats I tossed into the cattle trough, hands I raise up with her dirt in their lifelines. The dusk deepens. Startle of crickets around me. The farthest cow lows. The mourning doves’ silences drawing me closer. A woman’s voice calling. Don’t tarry too long. Now her kitchen light kindles. The gone faces waiting around her spread table. The glow of her fire in the hearth. Deeply Rooted V: Life Within, 2015 (acrylic mixed-media, 12x12x3) by Ellen Hathaway
KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER served as the North Carolina Poet Laureate from 2005 to 2009 and was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2012. She is the author of nine poetry collections including Black Shawl (Louisiana State University Press, 1998; reviewed in NCLR 1999), which won the 1998 Roanoke Chowan Award for Poetry; Catching Light (Louisiana State University Press, 2002), which won the 2003 SIBA book award; and Descent (Louisiana State University Press, 2012; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013), which won the 2013 SIBA book award. Her poetry has been featured in several issues of NCLR, including the 2008 issue, which also features an interview with her. Read more about her in Tara Powell’s appreciation (published in NCLR Online 2015) on the occasion of Byer being the 2013 honoree of the North Carolina Writers Conference.