LITR 3731: Creative Writing 2006
Student Poetry Submission

JT O’Neal

The Lady and the Mountain

(Revised 10.02.06)

She wanders this lonesome mountain

where the sun shies from a touch

and each crackling step

            breaks the icy silence

            on the path to a bygone farmhouse.

Through a ruined doorway

she steps a century back.

            A thick of ghosts

            sting her cheeks with stares

            from bone-chilled hollows.

She watches them chaff their hands

by the shadow of flame,

then sing in rounds to each other

            in defiance of forgetting,

                        playing the parlor game

                        of who they were.

She leaves behind the two small rooms

in the shimmering silver footfalls

of a woman once called mother.

            Hand in hand they drift

            down the mountain.

Led away from the lies of evergreens,

she kneels in the stony field

            where bare limbs

            stain the snow in

            garnet shades.

With her hands in fallow ground

the Lady sews the whispers of this lonesome mountain

            and raises a joyful elegy   

            that exalts the unremembered,

                        who step in time

                        to the music of memory.

Revision Account--"The Lady and the Mountain" by JT O’Neal

            The inspiration for this piece came from a Christmas visit to my mother’s home in the mountains of Virginia, where she has fifteen acres on the side of a mountain in Fries. On the property next to her are an old barn and farmhouse. After talking with the owner of that land, I learned that the barn and farm house were over one hundred years old. He thought that nobody had lived in them for about a hundred years. My guess is that they were there during the civil war. On the other side of my mom’s land, not far down the road, is an old cemetery that has some stones dating back to pre-civil war days. The previous owners of the farm, the Funk family, have graves in the cemetery, some of which are marked as early as 1836. The quiet and solitude of the mountain greatly impressed me. I often sat out on the porch (bundled up, of course) just to take in the silence. It is a magical place, and I wanted to somehow convey that impression through a poem. When Dr. White made the comment that the piece was magical, it made me feel that I might have achieved the goal I had set. That was perhaps the best comment (for my writer’s ego, anyway).

            With the first stanza, I tried to paint a picture of the mystical reality of the place. The road—two dirt tracks in the ground—that led to the farmhouse was covered by icy snow for the duration of our visit, although it did not snow while we were there. The road happened to fall on a portion of the mountain in perpetual shade. The sun passed at such an angle that its light, blocked by a mix of evergreens and leafless poplars (I think), never touched the ground. My aunt and I walked this road on our way to explore the old farmhouse and barn. We were both struck with an overwhelming sense of history when we stepped into those old buildings. An idea of the lives our forebears led began to take shape. We could imagine the harshness of the mountain in winter. The extreme effort it must have taken to survive became less of an abstraction to me. I felt connected to the people whose remains lay in that cemetery. I wanted to write a poem that (in addition to evoking the qualities of the mountain) would to justice to that human connection.

            I had been thinking about writing the poem for a while, at least since I visited again in the summer, but it was not until I took this class that  I sat down to write it. I was pleased with the draft I read to the class, but there were still a few things that bugged me. The connection to the cemetery seemed weak to me. I had been trying to avoid overdoing the morbid aspect of bodies in the ground, but I think I undershot my target on this first (actually 5^th) draft. Hearing the reaction of the class concerning this weaker stanza helped me focus on what I needed to do to fix it. It was suggested that I intensify the connection, and I completely agree. Some people had problems with the “lying evergreen” in this stanza, and some really liked it. I ultimately kept the idea, but made it clearer by changing it to the “lies of evergreens.” This stanza is probably the most changed, and I think it contains more sense of movement and further illuminates the relationship between the ghost mother and the Lady. In the revised poem, the Lady is led by the mother away from the lies of evergreens to the stony field. I think this indicates the idea that the ghosts know that they are fooling themselves, but they need help to break the cycle.

            In the next stanza (the second most revised), the Lady provides that help. It was pointed that “sings” and “elegy” were redundant. They were. So I wondered: what did I want to say here? What was the effect of the elegy?  How did the Lady form the connection with the ghosts? Not everyone got the “hands in the land” connection to farming, so I decided to strengthen that image cluster. The elegy becomes the crop reaped by the Lady, who reinvigorates forgotten and fallow earth which is the symbols of those who came before, whose sacrifice for the land is themselves. I think the ending works better now.

            I will most likely submit this piece for publication. It was great to get a chance to work out the kinks with a critical audience. I wish I had that all the time.

            Also, I am working on a follow-up about the mountain in Spring. It’s still germinating.