Poetry by R.M. Kinder
This house bursts with loving you—
all of you—our voices, vernacular:
“going out of a night,” “Virgie’s man,” “I had went.”
Dear to me, that peasant language I once spoke freely and well,
but it charmed only a few.
Our breed laughed often, sometimes so heartily
the laugh itself was the greatest pleasure of a day,
a day of work—toil—thorough and demanding and done!
We laughed before supper and after,
prayed before the meal and before bed.
What was class and status
but a cloud over land not ours?
We had dumplings, and pot roast, weather,
and animals close to us, named, and well kept.
I loved all of you, and, then, even our enemies
who seamed us together, separate, whole,
a nature, bearing the flags of ourselves,
nothing but that, and proud, proud, proud.
R. M. Kinder is a Missouri writer, author of three collections of short fiction and two novels. Her poems have appeared in Cottonwood, SHR, Appalacian Journal and other journals; her collection, The Likes of Us, was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize at SE Missouri State University.
