In a Hollow Among the Hills
an old dirt road meanders under oak and beech, past rhododendron, through a shallow creek and out into light, meadows on either side. At the end of the road, a house held long in memory, a narrow house with a broad front porch of plain boards worn smooth by the years. Another road, forking off from the first, takes a higher track past the old Cook place and ends at an ancient hilly farm where corn and tomatoes ripen every bright August, and firefly nights bring cool mountain air to the garden where for years on end an old work horse pulled a plow through rocky soil, sometimes followed by a girl, barefoot and gangly in her summer dress, a girl who married a distant cousin, moved over the ridge, settled in the narrow little house, and became my mother.
lightning bugs blinking
a tangle of honeysuckle
on a broken fence
Sherry Poff grew up in the hills of West Virginia. She now lives and writes in Ooltewah, Tennessee. Sherry holds an MA in Writing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is a member of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild and Poetry Society of Tennessee. Her stories and poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Artemis, Salvation South, and elsewhere.
**Featured image credit: Manuel Torres Garcia, matoga – Pexels