I come from generations
of Carolina soil, red-dirt
roads, back-country Virginia.
Ancestral apple orchards,
onion picking—my genetic markers,
some kind of backwoods double-helix
tying poverty to potential.
My granddaddy never went
a day without mud
on his boots, hands rough and
chapped from picking Vidalia onions,
a hunger for knowledge coursing through
his Carolina blood.
When he died,
I slowly started
to inhale that bitter
earthiness, coming
from the slow realization
that granddaddy’s onions
got us through,
the sharpness of onion,
the sweetness of dirt.
