A poem for West Virginia Day
Happy birthday, West Virginia.
Today is West Virginia Day, when we celebrate the day in 1863 when West Virginia was admitted to the Union.
Before you start thinking too seriously about grabbing some pepperoni rolls, we thought we’d give you something to reflect on first. We turned to state poet laureate Marc Harshman and asked him to choose some verse to share.
He passed along the following poem from his collection WOMAN IN RED ANORAK.
SMALL TOWN, WEST VIRGINIA after Tomas Tranströmer Town is closed today. Smokeless chimneys, rain-slicked and empty streets. I don’t know why. It hasn’t asked much of me lately. Like a fever, perhaps, it will pass, open again tomorrow. The sun glints on the damp pavements and a few windows shine in the dark face of the warehouse. I haul myself up the ridge to where my words race, then tumble, soundlessly over the cliff. I hold myself close, and listen, and with my back to the wind, lift my arms, and try again, say the word feather, say the word soar. The quiet answers with its own names. I should do this more often, and whether or not the peopled world below goes on or not, this older world remains as these sun-drenched warblers testify with their reedy whistling. I should more often do, at least, this much. I should this much do, as if even the least of us mattered. I lift up a stone and watch it soar. I can almost see where its feathers begin . . .
From Marc Harshman’s 2018 collection, WOMAN IN RED ANORAK, published by Lynx House Press/University of Washington Press in Spokane, WA. The collection won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize. Harshman’s most recent book is FOLLOWING THE SILENCE, published by Press 53, a small press based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Speaking of hauling myself “up the ridge,” scroll down for one of my favorite illustrations by West Virginia’s original travel writer, David Hunter Strother, aka Porte Crayon. The image of a hiker standing atop a crag was included in Strother’s ten-part series The Mountains, which introduced the new state of West Virginia to the American reading public following the Civil War.
We’ll see you back here this weekend for the Saturday “Weakly Reader.”