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• 1 media/shoes ps.jpg 2016-08-19T04:58:05-07:00 Poems by Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate 5 Urban Appalachian Experiences image_header 2016-09-19T11:50:52-07:00 During the “Great Migration” (1900-1980) 20 million Southerners, both black and white, journeyed to the North and West. Economic opportunities in urban industrial centers drew sharecroppers and other low-wage southerners, especially during the First and Second World Wars. Moving to an unfamiliar urban environment where their accents and culture were negatively stereotyped left many urban Appalachians feeling homesick or trying to integrate their traditions with new conditions.
  
  Pauletta Hansel was named Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate in 2014. She was born in southeast Kentucky and moved to Cincinnati in 1979. Her poems often reflect her Appalachian roots.
   
  Home
  
  Home is where they raised me up
  like Ms. Pearl’s squash plant,
  People’s Garden, climbing
  toward the sun.
  Home is cookouts on the street,
  my grandma’s candied yams
  enough for anybody passing by;
  breadcrumbs for the birds.
  Home is playing
  hopscotch, Double Dutch,
  Little Sally Walker       what I love best
  is skipping over Mother Nature
  pushing through the sidewalk cracks
  (won’t break nobody’s  back).
  Home’s a shortcut through the alley,
  a key to my own front door.
   
  Sometimes it’s the inside
  I love best—my room,
  the sweetness, morning bacon
  cooking on the stove;
  hot wet air after a bath;
  laughing at my mama’s
  hair all over the place
  when she took off her hat,
  could have filled up the doorway.
  
              Sometimes I don’t look
              to the outside:
              ripped up, torn up
              so many changes come.
  
  Home is how people
  need each other here;
  in all of this
  we’ve got to find the good,
  the way we’re glued; the ones
  who always seem to come
  to be that glue;
  the heart
  we can’t let die.
  
              I’m gonna be right here for you.
              Who’s gonna rise up for me?
                                                    Pauletta Hansel  
  Inspired by a writing experience with Over the Rhine Residents in 2012, sponsored by Over the Rhine Community Housing for their Our Beloved Community Program. Published in ÆQAI Journal (June 2014)
  
  Speech Lessons
  
  When my daddy left
  the Bible Institute Harlan
  for Eastern  Kentucky Teachers College
  100 miles or so up Highway 25,
  he got sent to speech class
  same as the other mountain kids.
  
  My mother says
  his vowels spread
  thick as milk gravy—even she,
  from just one county over,
  and already a fine cook,
  couldn’t always separate the lumps.
  
  Daddy liked the class just fine
  until they tried to make him change
  how he said pie.
  For years I’d beg, “Tell me the story
  again, and how you’d say it.”
  
  And he’d stretch that “i” from here
  to Harlan, back again to hear me laugh
  and teach me how
  to listen so that later when I’d headed
  north up 75 and on across the river
  I’d always know the way
  
  to find my tribe.
  
                                                              Pauletta Hansel (Tangle, Dos Madres Press, 2015)
  
  Garden Sestina
  
  Not a landscape, I told my husband, but a garden
  to surround this house we newly own.
  In this I am my mother’s daughter.
  Now the edges of our yard are never still—
  always the butterflies and bees among my mother’s
  lilies transplanted from the edges of the home she lost.
  
  We bought this house the year we lost
  my father. There was no garden
  then; the day we signed, my mother
  and I planted bulbs dug from her own
  yard into ours. No matter how much more I plant I still
  remember the first breaking of the soil—not the daughter’s
  
  but a passing from a mother to her daughter,
  beauty from the life she’d lost.
  That year my mother’s flowers went to seed, and still
  she mourns my father first, then the garden
  that she left behind. On her own
  and far from what she knew my mother
  
  cannot live the life she loved. I know my mother
  sometimes feels she has become the daughter
  to the daughter; together our own
  equilibrium is lost,
  except here in the garden
  where her wisdom still
  
  grows up from earth. She says our town is never still;
  nights she cannot sleep, my mother
  hears the sirens, traffic, trains. Cut flowers from the garden
  wilt in city water. This daughter
  knows how much she’s lost,
  I mourn my own
  
  place cradled in the crook of my own
  parents’ love. I once was one who had a home I still
  could go to and be tended—that’s lost
  too for me in ways my mother
  and I never speak of in this city where the daughter
  tends those things uprooted from her mother’s garden.
   
                                      Pauletta Hansel (The Lives We Live in Houses, Wind Publications, 2011)
   
  QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT AND DISCUSS
  1. Both of these poems are about an Appalachian sense of community. What are the elements of that community?
  2. How has migration to the urban North shaped that sense of community?
  3. Do members of the community see each other and their identity the same way others do? Are there examples of this in these poems?