To you who collect awards and fellowships;
to you who receive grants because you
drink deeply of the Dakotas,
probe Pennsylvania’s coals and keystones,
and weather the wilds of Wyoming;
to you whose ancestors were anchored in the Ozarks
of Arkansas and harangued hunger in Georgia,
to you heirs of the lyric disintegration of Louisiana
and the ever glad expanses of Florida,
to you who narrate Norwegian silence in St. Paul
and Polish pride in Peoria;
to you who vocalize vocatives to pioneers in Nebraska
and brandish bowls of dust in Oklahoma,
to you lamenters of Los Angeles
mourning manzanilla buried beneath boulevards,
to you mountaineers with Cascadian maps
etched into your hands and hearts;
to all of you who are rooted,
who go deep,
who breathed one air
and drank at one well
and whose bones tremble
with authentic tales to tell:
We, the superficial,
the skimmers of the surface,
the hoppers, the movers, the trawlers, the flitters,
the fallen branches, the detached vines,
with our chameleon skins and changing accents,
our dabbling and dilettanting,
our peering and fleeing,
our pretending and faking and lying and longing:
We salute you and
we grant you your grants.
Tell us of your peanut plantations and pecan pies,
your Yankee wits and transcendentalists,
your bluegrass and blue crabs,
your race riots and red rock.
Tell us and watch us smile
tiny smiles of envy at
your details, your depth,
your Special State Commission for the Arts
Rising Star Award Fellowship.
Tell us and watch us smile
tiny smiles of contempt at
your illusions of otherness and
your parochial parrotry.
For we love as you love
hate as you hate
hope as you hope
sink as you sink
fly as you fly.
You keep the earth.
We’ll keep the sky.
(Words and photos by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson.)