Inspired Afterwards Poem by Sandra Osborne

Cherokee roots, mountain laurels, Tennessee waters,
and two hundred year old gravestones, that I fancied
as the graves of pirates, as one was barely chiseled “Captain”,
and sticking menacingly half broken and crooked out of
the forgotten ground; all gather together with the ghosts
and glorious days of my youth.

Like the dry flaked patch of red clay that we ceremoniously christened
“The Battlefield”, as it was a scorched portion of the endless woods
where nothing beautiful grew, being overgrown with sticker
bushes and so called because we knew to our bones that Indians
were buried there. And it was here that my dog Junie saved my life,
by offering up hers, and saving us both.

And all the steammy scorching windless days spent searching
through freshly toiled soil, because it didn’t cost nuttin’,
and there was no Nintindo, but we couldn’t have got one anyway,
being from one of those hard working Alabama families whose kids
roamed the neighborhoods like packs of wild dogs,
playing “kick the can” and other games we'd make up from
some newly cherrished discarded trash and imagination.
And while walking down those long miles of tractor turned
brown and red furrows, we'd find those cold and beautiful,
few and far between, grey and white pieces of flint, perhaps
worked by some distant indian kin into razor sharp arrowheads,
knives, scrapers and stone axes once surely skillfully used
to fell some green and fertile corner of the Alabama woods.

And those many hot, warm and chilly Saturdays spent
yelling “Roll Tide” as “The Bear” won yet another
hard fought “three yards and a cloud of dust” football battle
against some other Rebel or Yankee college team. And even
the day when the man on the radio said that he had died.
Even the day he said that Elvis had died.
That day spent shoveling out pungent urin soaked
horse stalls on Dieberts farm where I was the help,
and never got closer to the beautiful saddlebred brown and chestnut beasts
than when emptying those empty smelly stalls,
laden with pitchfork and fresh straw.

All of these memories and more float and hold the recesses of
my mind appearing so clearly while wandering through the poems
and writings of a poet named Tammy. A great poet, an inspiring poet,
a poet whose wonderful words “kudzu” and “Cherokee”
do what great poets do. They Inspire. They lift and lighten
a weighted down soul and shine like the red gold orange of the sunrise,
and comfort an old Alabama girl like the red Alabama clay itself.
Like beautiful poetry always does. Always,
even afterwards…