EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re sharing an excerpt of a poem and story by singer-songwriter H.C. McEntire written specifically for our Spring 2023 journal and shared with permission. Order your copy or, better yet, subscribe today — and support nonprofit roots music journalism in print and online for a full year!
There are times when the gravity of a moment lands somewhere between the metaphysical and physiological. Swollen ripples of time and space align, lapping at your 41-year-old knees like a youthful, steady tide. Ancestors arrive as a collective pulse, impressing upon you all the things unseeable by the naked eye, all the unimaginable ways of feeling and healing, all which transcends known words. They show you a different language.
“Slow Omen” feels like the starting place toward this journey — nods to my current navigation through concepts of aging, work, fertility, growing, forging, self-reliance, loneliness, little joys, and recognizing the thread through them all, and where the tracing of that thread can take you.
Every Acre, my third solo album (ND review), is the uneasy stillness before a blackened sky, the slow grumble of thunder that dilates into a wild roar. It is the alder bending in the squall, the linens whipping on the clothesline. It is the single-pane kitchen window from which to watch all this unfold. It is the gentle hand that soothes the anxious hound. It is the barometric exhale after: The clear, bright next morning sun, that simple turn of a new dawn. It is a love that will steal the tread from boots, dilate the direction of edges, convince the belief in something bigger. It is an outstretched body atop the bone-dry moss, both the cardinal and crow watching from the well house as every acre of land is scorched, sorted, sold, stolen, reseeded, ceded, renamed, repeated. Pay attention to witness the honest unfolding of humanity — every angle of the ego exposed, every asset inventoried by width and weight, some of us rich in one thing and reduced in another — but all of us ripe with an aching to be chosen.
Raised in the Blue Ridge foothills of rural Appalachia, I discovered music down the radio dial of country music call letters and between Baptist hymnal pages. My interest in songwriting began while pursuing a bachelor of fine arts degree in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. This devotion to poetic storytelling remains at the center of my work — in exploring intersections of culture, place, and perspective; in honoring the power of collected words on a page; in the careful negotiation of succinctness, imagery, curiosity, and meaning. Being a creator is how I choose to spend most of my time and where I process my lived experience; it’s where I try to make sense of things, or make peace with them.
Slow Omen
I have been mending my own hems
ever since
I saw a cotton field
on fire, the black earth in blisters, leveling
everything back
to its beginning.
The shuttered mill
in center square,
almost barren but
still breeding
faint echoes of labor once mistaken for harvest.
Still, the ghosts go on working, eager to stay limber and useful,
to keep earning a living, to stand in a line
and be called
by a name.
--
I have been singing
my own hymns
ever since
you arrived
as the omen; in tears, slowly thinning
linseed oil to a tone
between oxblood
and crimson.
Firewood, dry
as a bone, piled high, just enough
to get through
the winter.
I am only trying
to love something real, to keep these filthy fingers from trembling.
And at all costs,
find the means to leave fresh wildflowers
on the kitchen table.
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