Roofing for Aunt Pearl

By Bob Henry Baber / January 1, 1982

Appalachia mountains

This article originally appeared in Southern Exposure Vol. 10 No. 1, "Who Owns Appalachia?" Find more from that issue here.

“They want me t’ move t’ town,”

bent over her cane and squinting

up at me covered with stop-leak and tar,

holding hot rolled roof,

“but a told ’em,”

her palsied hand’s finger

pointing to the soil,

“that I’m Cold Knob born,

Cold Knob bred,

’n’ when I die, by God,

I’m gonna be Cold Knob dead!”

 

— Bob Henry Baber

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Bob Henry Baber

Bob Henry Baber is a West Virginia poet and one of the founders of the Southern Appalachian Writers’ Cooperative SA WCJ. He is consulting director of the Appalachian Poetry Project. (1982)

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