The Robins, That Is
/Susan Underwood
The generations who put me in this skin
would hardly recognize me in late April dusk
among suburban dogwoods past their bloom,
a faint delineation of the daughter they thought
to make, sitting in a meager backyard.
Just beyond my kitchen door, the noise
of passing cars obscures the reunion I came here for:
to be among the robins stirring just before they roost,
their broken, bossy syllables of plain-speak
common like my own voice talking low to them.
I try to imitate their garbled whistling in my throat
and with my lips, calling to communicate my place.
They listen for their own, but I think they tilt toward me.
I have to believe they know I’m here.
Author’s Note: "The Robins, That Is" will be included in my forthcoming book of poetry SPLINTER, which deals with the Appalachian diaspora and questions what comes of staying "home" versus what comes from moving out of the Mountain South. This poem in particular is about the fleeting spirits which compelled me to stay put in Appalachia. I wanted to live near my parents and grandparents. I chose deliberately to do all I could to be near them. And yet we do lose our elders. And the landscape and our own lives alter in ways which are much out of our control. The robins in the poem are actual, and the experience with them was actual. But they also represent a sense of what it means to be a species which stays. Robins in East Tennessee are common through all four seasons, though more prevalent in balmy months. I have a sense that each generation faces new obstacles. Although I have stayed in Appalachia, I don't live in any way the agrarian life my ancestors did. I don't know what they would make of me now, and it's a question I ponder at least some point every day. How do I connect the lives which came before me with the lives in our region which will continue long after I'm gone? What kind of messenger am I of culture and family?
Susan O'Dell Underwood is the author of the novel Genesis Road (Madville 2022), and one full-length poetry collection, The Book of Awe (Iris 2018). She directs the creative writing program at Carson-Newman University near Knoxville, Tennessee, where she also teaches courses in Appalachian and Native American literature. Her poems are published and forthcoming in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Oxford American, and the Southern Humanities Review.
