My "Hayseed Voice"

Because I needed to heal from a disintegrating marriage, I retreated into myself. It was during this time, however, that other voices came to me and spoke to me – in the form of poetry.

After my husband had left for work and after my kids had kissed my cheek and hurried off to school, I’d sit at the side of my bed and take ‘dictation’. The voices in my head gave me words and words, pages and pages of poetic verse. There were different styles and cadences, but one voice stood out above the rest. I was never happy until I heard it.

I called it my ‘hayseed voice’. In my mind’s eyes, I could picture the features and body of the owner of that voice. He must have been in his late years, his face lined and wrinkled from tilting it to the sun too much to check on how the weather would be for his crops. He wore a straw hat; his mouth was crooked to one side from the pipe that always rested there. I saw him leaning against an old, rotting fence gazing out over the land and then musing about his life before that land; when he was young, full of his own juices, when he was in love and walked tall and straight. Before he wore practical overalls and a faded work shirt and before his labors bent his back like a comma in the middle of a sentence. Before he settled for much less than he’d hoped for.