This Land, Full of Said Regions

full of coal roads slanting from the highways,

winding to those hells hidden not from the sky,

pitting the mountains,

turning the creeks to clay

turning the farms to clay;

this land full of housing by the rivers,

no homes but in the flood plain,

old miners, lost,

resting on lawn chairs lapped by lespedeza;

this land that could have been and was busted down,

home of something never here

a snake coiling fire from the wet easy earth —

for this land nothing waits save death and time

and the cows which look up from their stirrings,

astonished, four-square, brazen.

— Jim Stokely