Low and Rustic Life
You grew up in the dirt in the Louisville mud
with tree sap waking you to the schoolhouse where
little pink girls sat aside you so to marry
you, as you was the one going to rise yourself
up from the manure of your birth right.
You always thought your wits would get you far
away from us in this dirt, this dirt that ripened
you. This dirt that gave you thickness you chose
to shed. You wiped it from your face to, so you said,
unsully a sullied head, head of your mother, your father.
Your purple words got you to the university where
they teach you how ignoble was your present ignorance
and you recant your days of mudding around with
brothers and sisters in the outside, when better they
could have been spent with thick worded paper volumes.
One day you quit your churchgoing and said your time-
you said it like you owned this time–your time was better
spent in your studies away from your family, away from
your Maker. You left not soon after, to cut in to
that deeper level away from the surface of things, you said.
It is our hope that your rhyming and philosophizing
gives you some great pleasure which mother and I could not
attend to during your upbringing in this rural dirt. We hear
they where you have taken residence say unkind words of such
a lowly life as we begot you in, and for this, we are sorry.
—Kevin Mosby