Hillbilly Music

It is dawn over these summer hills. The blue skirts of fog billow and lift and show their knees.      
The water below caps white tipped and nips blue grey with the heads of big fish.        
Pink dawn shows her lovely face.        
She smiles a covenant with centuries of great pride.      
    
Her arms hold a tale of the people, who were my Grandfathers, and my Mother’s own.        
They were my Uncles and the children that rose from them.        
They had dirty faces and broken backs. They owned mules and hounds that knew the way home.      
    
And I am here.        
And I am made breathless by the scene and reminder of it.      
I hear hillbilly music.    
 
The instrumental keeps my people in mind and balances the world.      
Keeping trouble distant, but a part of me.      
Its efforts place compassion in my palm.      
Hands with gentleness like mine strum.      
They pat on knees hard times broken by laughter and happy families.  
    
The sweet mandolin plays amazing grace with harmony sung by women in rags.        
And they brush my hair back softly from my face. And ask me to show it.        
And grin that my fingers are not blistered. And that my arms are not leathered by sun.      
   
And they hum a new song, about my journey, and about my son.        
The melody becomes words of my own and I miss him like heartbreak, but hold it dear.        
One day soon... I will show him this view.        
From a bridge that spreads the morning before you, like a kind woman holding a photograph.