Poems by Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate
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
- Both of these poems are about an Appalachian sense of community. What are the elements of that community?
- How has migration to the urban North shaped that sense of community?
- Do members of the community see each other and their identity the same way others do? Are there examples of this in these poems?
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