Monday Verse: Young Kentucky

Jesse Stuart lived and wrote in Greenup County, Kentucky - the place where I was raised and lived for the first 30 years of my life. From the time I was a young elementary school student and learned about him, I wanted to be a writer. I’ll write more about Jesse Stuart one day, but I was thinking about the poetry and stories of the hills when I was at the Buffalo Valley Baptist Church Bible Conference last week. I had a great time, the church and her pastor did a great job hosting (as usual). I was blessed to preach twice and enjoyed hearing the preaching of the Word.

So first, a portion of a poem by Jesse Stuart, then some pictures of wild and wonderful West Virginia.

Young Kentucky

by Jesse Stuart

The winter birds are roosting in the fodder,

I hear them twitter when I pass at night;

I hear September winds in low-lipped laughter

Combing the gray corn-stalks in white moonlight.

I see old stubble fields and fresh green weeds

Beneath old ferns and leaves and blades of fodder.

I see the timid rabbit coming out to feed

And then I see his playful mate come after.

I hear the long notes of the hunter's horn

Sound over silent hills in white moonlight -

It is not music like the wind in corn,

The notes are coarser than the warring fife.

And I have picked a solitary star

Above the pine-cone fire where the hunters are.

I hate to leave springtime among the hills

Of dark Kentucky and her solitudes

I love her blood-root and her daffodils,

I love fern-shaded water in beech woods,

And midnight singing of the whippoorwill,

And thin-piped music from the leave swamp-frogs.

I love dark silence on a wooded hill

And mushrooms grown on old rotted logs.

Preachers at the conference

Elk River

Long way up to Buffalo "Valley"

Gauley Bridge, WV