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Fiddlin' With Words
Marlinton, WV - 2004

I know a place where water flows uphill.
Small-town friendly, part-time lovers.
Strumming, forgetting time,
the stage buys everyone a round of smiles.
When I played my fiddle that time,
I felt like a gypsy princess.

Did you get enough sleep last night?
It was dark, vodka was involved.
I meant to go to bed, but I can sleep next week.
The younguns rubbed youth in the eyes of elders.

I need this wheel to turn backward.
A reunion of friends,
a circus tent backdrop,
and a banjolin slides in.
Homer is king around here.

Sparkling pines in a sea of oaks.
Nature, notes, and voices pervade my senses.
Slick as vinyl and dripping liquid syllables.
The ground moves, life flutters, the word smiles.
A totem of noble silence.
You're ok. Just break the mirror.

Tell her I got some moonshine that will clean her silver.
Yellows laughs when the corn grows white.
The puzzled heart of a con-man's daughter,
Hair tied up and twisted as tight as a black rose.

As heaven wipes away the tears of the moon,
it begins to rain.
Saying goodbye is never fun.

Allegheny Echoes Workshops 2004
Craig Auge, Laura Bentley, Jan Bils, Ryan Burns, Michelle Horan, Dave Lambert, Brittany Macias, Leslie Nahodil , Anita Parker, Eddie Pendarvis, Todd Stoops, John Tomasic, Sherrell Wigal

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This place is hawk circle and blue chicory -
A million green spruces pointing skyward.
This place is a gospel song, It’s me, It’s me O Lord.
The song of generations hangs like the slow misty morning
reminding us to look toward God.
Today I pack my bags, including one with words.
Hopefully it is bottomless.
I come for a vacation I have never known.
I take the role of traveler, student, a person to be shown.

This place hides the mountain lion, cat-head biscuits and fiddlehead ferns,
black heart cherries and mockingbirds, crystal chains and fairydiddle tears.

Someone is calling my name.
Listen to the rhythm of old men hoeing
down by the creek in the rich, black earth.
Sound scrapes along the spinning world, hums music for the words in the wind,
fills my ears, spills from my eyes when I laugh or cry.
Something is burning, feels like heat rising from Hell,
my soul on fire with red-hot words sparked from graves that bear my name,
words from the heart, not the brain.

My eyes adjust to the sights and vistas around me,
organza covered mountains blending into the hazy sky,
rainbows arching their backs.
Light gathers in these bright trees, this luminous rock.
It shines into me, collects in my skin, leaps from my mouth when I speak.
Amid the verdant splendor, a group of dead trees
stripped of leaves and life creates stark free-form sculptures
against the blue and white backdrop of sky.
These burnt offerings, brought by men and women
labeled untamed in younger time, turn back to the soil, enriching this place
in which their revolutionary daydreams are rooted.

I come to this place to ride the muse,
singe flesh and words, spit whiskey nights across the sky.
Poet with a black eye and blood-red toenails
Juba-dances across the Gauley,
through boulders at Beartown.
Love, passion, art, all these things come.
In case I get separated
I wear the earth-spun fabric of black inked faces,
bloodied breastbones
and hymns that heal.

Allegheny Echoes Snowshoe Workshops 2001
Liz Archer, Craig Auge, Jan Adkins-Bills, Leigha Hope Bing, Suzette Bradshaw,
Dave Lambert, MaryAnne Mayne, Matthew Mullins, Kelley Sassano, Janet Trickett

Instructors - Kirk Judd and Sherrell Wigal

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What We Have Been Given

We were once the troubadours and the bards,
whatever we are given, we lift it up.
On the road of faith, the eternal troll holds out his hand
filled with leaves and grasses and invites us into the forest.
"Brown and green, hard to be seen, brown and green."

We are sucked into the orbit, we feel the cosmic pull.
Spirits catch headwinds, lift higher and higher.
Viper's Bugloss and Crown Vetch fill in the folds of scenic pathways.
We walk some and listen some and share some words and thoughts.
Pilgrim Poets, we see Louise McNeill sitting in a white pine on Gauley Mountain.
(Everybody else thinks it is a yellow goldfinch.)
Here the grass bows down in homage to the day, the view, the earth -
orchids in bloom, a carpet of poems on the Cranberry floor.
Holy Band of Word Saints, we hear a rose pogonia whisper to a purple-fringed orchid.
(Everybody else thinks it is the wind.)

Here we rise, rise to the music, the words, the occasion of ourselves.
The sounds we hear are scattered like spells cast into our hearts
We cross the threshold of each other and see a flaming hand against the sky.
The music echoes through the hills and opens up our souls.
We laugh and cry and fly kites and bring our poems to life.

This is the dream born in the fog of longer days,
christened with the rain of mandolin tunes, turned to reality with mountain shine.
Boil that cabbage down boys and tap them golden shoes,
the fastest mountain song can be the bluest of the blues.
Poets on the wing, swinging high, swinging low,
swinging where them pickers won't dare to go.
The music's in the fog and the fog is everywhere.
Standing on this windy peak, we know desire.
We look into the mirrors of our eyes and see
the deepest caves and sooted fires of ancient lives.

What we have been given, we have lifted up to here.
On the Allegheny front all things come home.

Allegheny Echoes Snowshoe Workshops 2000
Craig Auge, Jan Adkins-Bills, MaryAnne Mayne, Martha Merz, Dave Lambert, Paula White

Instructors - Kirk Judd and Sherrell Wigal

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We Come Searching

for ourselves,
waiting for the mountain to say our names, to breathe us into existence.
Here, right here
is where outside influence means nothing,
where even civil wars pass on by.
It is our own face we find in the rock - our own words whispered in the trees.
This incandescent mountain, lit with song, befriends us.
Here the streams flow west
and words leap out of every fossil, fern, and breath.
The Allegheny blue goddess wears the wild hair of love
and sings through the rocks to us - the bear and oak - who hear.
Music and words are the rhythm which pulls our pulse to harmony.
We hear nothing but the songs of summer sunshine
rejoicing in the blue-note sky.
As we lie in the grass feeling blessed,
nature shares with us one of its treasures; this day - this place.
Ancient hemlocks seek their own path
as they twist through chasms of sandstone towards the sun.
Silence lives in vacant nests resting in the tops of high-country trees.
We walk the fields and hear the sounds of wind and bird and water.
Our spirits breathe and sing and soar and grasp the poetry of nature.
Prayer bells echo - we, Allegheny's redeemed,
ring spun-gold poems as music bleeds into red-fleeced clouds.
In the last honey drip of evening sun,
musicians tune for the midnight chorus.
Feet tap in friendly support.
Soft voices, sweet melodies.
Shadows of good ol' boys dance on the rafters til the silver moon rises,
then falls back to the mountain's embrace.
Saved again on Snowshoe.

Allegheny Echoes Snowshoe Workshops 1999
Craig Auge, Jan Adkins-Bills, Sue Bing, Karen Colker, MaryAnne Mayne, Martha Merz, Dave Lambert, Jo Ann Wilbin

Instructors - Kirk Judd and Sherrell Wigal

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SACRED IN GREEN

Like moonshine - hot wax - sunshine oozes down my body.
Tunes spread out their tendrils,
twine out over the hills, weave all time together.
Sedge and timothy grasses sway
to the rhythm of the music's call.
At the chanter of pipes, my spirit takes heed
as air expands, billows, and rushes the reeds.
Imprints brand my urban heart.
I struggle to write a line in five minutes.

We see the sacred in green dragonflies and dead trees.
Blue topaz poems coming out of the mountains on fire.

Fiddler greets the dusk
right on time out of the light.
The wind dies, then picks up the next phrase,
coaxing the notes to follow.
'Me on this mountain hear'd a little island of heaven.'
A bonfire burns in the valley below;
a soft drone arises from fiddle and bow.

The dreaded poets
sit in a circle of hellfire and mystery.

What does the earth teach you?
Who dares speak? Listen!
What way does the wind blow?
Ask the tunes. They will tell you.

Shadow notes and starlight dapple the leaves.
Hammers and string webs - "Folding Down The Sheets"
woven like Cabin Creek quilts across the crest.
The music drifts in every ear of light.

Clouds lift, and the sky sings its morning song.
Scottish pipes ring out, other pipes fade away,
and we are called back to these mountains high.

Worn thumb picks of banjo players
vamp into the songs their granddaddies played;
Hearts on the bridge -
Mastertone on the metal.

"Yellow Barber", "Yew Piney", "Poca River Blues";
Tunes strummed into every leaf
that turns in
to earth and us
a smiling eye.

Allegheny Echoes Creative Writing Class, 1998
Craig Auge, Jan Bills, Sue Bing, Karen Colker, Teri Hayes, Mark Kolkin, Mark Molinari, Vickie Richardson-Ferrell, Linda Tate

Instructors - Kirk Judd, Sherrell Wigal

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Poet's Crossing

The sound of the Williams River
went to bed with me last night.
Stepping off the mountain, the trees clap their hands
in celebration of their people.
Bending into the earth,
the grass tastes like youth.

Calling the geese from the sky.
The sweep of one ridge to another,
and wishing to stand on both at the same time.
Somewhere the earth whispers your name,
and affection for chubby smiling men in bib overalls
carrying a bottle of J&B.

The mountains sing with poets' stories and pickers' songs -
banjo licks picking out the fence posts as we pass.
While wandering in the fog I thought
of "The Hounds of the Baskervilles".
Bones in the forest naming our names.
Belly up - little claws grasping at the flies
that sweep the flat fur.
Hard shell worm groping for its other half.

Blending words into my life
I am piped back to my dreams.
I love the sound of the rush of wind
inside my ears.
Ideas tumble like a rock slide
trying to find the buried thought.

The mountains speak!

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For more information specific to the Creative Writing classes e-mail:
Kirk Judd - taobilly@yahoo.com