Poem of the Day

On the Mountain

 Gary Phillips

1.

We’re on the mountain, my whole family. 

Even some of Granny’s shy Cherokee kin. 

I like to be near them

when I can get away from my cousin Judy.

Judy is almost ten years older than me 

and wants to carry me around all the time, 

even though I’m old enough to walk. I love her,

so I let her. Sometimes I run away and hide 

with the shy dark-skinned adults,

which also gets me close to Grandma Etta, 

who is my favorite person in the whole world.

The cousins are a tribe all our own. Soon 

we’re sledding and swinging across ravines 

on grapevines. I’m with all the people I love 

and never want to leave. I fall once or twice. 

When I cry, my mother carries me 

to the car and bundles me in the wide back seat. 

I sleep for the whole ride, except for when I sit up 

and see the big moon floating above the foothills,

a little ways from home.

2.

That reunion was sixty years ago. My mother is the matriarch 

now, the only surviving sibling out of twelve. The shy Cherokee 

cousins have mostly disappeared, but we rednecks remain, 

mountain hoogers they used to say. Today my cousins’ children 

tell me they love me. They regularly assemble the seven-hour drive

each way to visit my mother. Cousin Judy, teetering around 

with her oxygen machine, holds me every time she sees me, 

long and fierce and hard.

Gary Phillips