Rowan Oak, June 1998

High circling hawk was clue:
This is your home
My kinsman true.
Allspice bush in cedared yard
Gave evidences too
Green would and blue,
The red-tail, far too far to hear
Its brittle cry
(But at my hone outside the window high,
Persimmon perched, we’re eye to eye–
Same hawk, same cry.)

I leave the hawk behind
And walk the porch to door unscreened.
The whitewashed walls glow with their inner light,
The khaki, tan, and white,
The well-washed cotton green,
The woods a screen
Of all we’ve left behind.

It is your footprint that I trace–
House and hawk and light and door unscreened
The trabiated transom same
As at y own fond home.
Is each you here and find,
The portal arch of turnings,
And returnings,
Living with the dead and yet unborn,
To mirror still this day of origin,
The now of all-time, past and yet to come.
All time is one.

James Everett Kibler

James Everett Kibler is a novelist, poet, and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he taught popular courses in Southern literature, examining such figures as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and Larry Brown. Born and raised in upcountry South Carolina, Kibler spends much of his spare time tending to the renovation of an 1804 plantation home and the reforestation of the surrounding acreage. This home served as the subject of his first book, Our Fathers’ Fields: A Southern Story, for which he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction in 1999 and the Southern Heritage Society’s Award for Literary Achievement.

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