Troublesome

Patty Ireland

Who named you?
Who
first saw trouble here?

Was it finely grained shale, dripping gray with
quartz, calcite around your birthing bed?
Clay minerals of iron and alkaline
swelling, thickening with your touch?
Black coal beds sleeping, then curling snakelike beneath your depths?

Could it have been the blue mountains themselves
thrusting upward in a great, ancient
rumble of tectonic plates,
moving together, pushing apart?
Silent erosion whittling cavernous tapestries of
hollers and hills?

Was it Iroquois, Delaware, Shawnee, Cherokee or Mingo?
Long Hunters wayfaring from Southwest Virginia?

Was it Samuel Cornett? Old Clabe Jones?
Uncle Solomon Everidge trudging
hatless, barefoot,
pleading with Stone and Pettit to blow the breath of change
over your stillness?

Was it the Blue People, bathing in your depths,
cleansing skin the color of
cornflowers, thistles?

Or James Still himself,
wrestling with words as he watched you
undulate?

Was it my ancestors,
those you baptized,
who saw you shimmering silver
in the sun,
who
called your name out over the wind and rain,
blessing you,
cursing you,
claiming you?

Last night your temper flared,
sweeping away mobile homes, Dodge Rams,
Disney Frozen Elsa dolls, wagons,
livestock, highways,
bridges that hovered protectively above you,
Honda Passports.

People.

People.

People.

Your people.

I came here to feel you,
to sit by your banks,
moved by the gentle muse I
worshipped from
afar.

I leave here to stay alive.

Some trouble I have seen here now.