A while back I pointed to a website publishing Bill Hedrington’s collected poems. For the last week or so, Michael Smith and I have been updating the site, and I think you’ll find the new edition a nice improvement. The PDF is redone as well. Go. Read.
The Voices
I was born on the downhill side,
late in the year, in early December,
in the light’s heavy dip and hesitation,
when the old peoples prayed for beginning
in the snow-salted fields
and scattered bitterness of corn stalks;
but though I came fatly of that gaunt race,
though it was a different end and today that day,
the fields untracked by supplicants,
the corncribs many, and full,
still I carry their disappointed dead
buried in my body,
and am the outspoken child
of the silent generations of my cells—
for O, they call with the old voices,
in a millennium length of words,
in the thousand year cries of the dead,
that their lean voices, lost to these fields,
may be gathered up and justified in me.—Bill Hedrington, ca. 1968