“Attentive” by Becky Parker

For mobile devices, this poem is best viewed in landscape. 

Attentive mice danced in the hayloft while
Pa played the jaw harp and Uncle Patton
made his old fiddle sing.

It was early springtime, where down by the sleepy willows,
brilliantly flocked buttercups were pushing their way
out of the gray ground to touch the azure sky,

and the winter doldrums that bound mama like kudzu on
a picket fence begin to lose their hold. Gingham dresses
now adorned the clothesline and her songs drifted out of the pines

into the hearts of the miners working their coal
pits, who allowed themselves a glimpse of
an Appalachian sunrise.

Becky Parker’s works are found in Spirit Fire Review, Agape Review, Sweety Cat Press, Yellow Mama, Appalachia Bare, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, the Rye Whiskey Review, Pulse, the Green Shoe Sanctuary, Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, Amaranth Journal, Spire Light, Avocet, Mackenzie’s Publication, Salvation South, Heart of Flesh, Mildred Haun Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. In 2023, she won the Tennessee Mountain Writers’ Children’s Literature Award. She is the founder of Briar Haus Writes literary page.

Appalachia Bare published Becky’s poem “Rock, Paper, Scissors” in September 2022.

Featured image: 1946 Miners at the Kopperston Mines, Wyoming County, WV – Russell Lee, Dept. of Int., [NARA No. 540930] – Wikimedia, pub dom, coop project