Poetry by E.J. Wade

E.J. Wade is an educator and poet whose writing focuses on the silencing, exclusion, and invisibility of African American Women and their narratives. A five-time Pushcart Award nominee and Literary Editor of the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, she is a member of Chicago’s Goodman Theater’s GeNarration Storytelling Project. Wade’s poems are published in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Women Speak, Salvation South, and Callaloo Literary Journal. She holds a Doctor of Education from National Louis University, an MA in Appalachian Studies from Shepherd University, and an MA in Creative Media Practices from the University of The West of Scotland. 

In the Haze of Dawn, the Fields Awake

Hands calloused, bearing stories no ledger can take,
Women of Appalachia bend, sow, and weep,
Planting more than crops, nurturing a kinship worth keeping.

Their labor hums in the hush of cotton rows,
Sweat mingling with earth, where the river flows
A cradle of struggles nourishes silent ties, Binding
daughters, sisters, under the same skies.

Poverty weaves a narrow, unyielding seam,
Yet in sparing moments, is stitched a shared dream,
A passing of baskets, a whispered refrain, Strength
blossoms quietly amidst pulling of chain.

In kitchens that smell of cornbread and spice, They
measure their worth not in gold, but in sacrifice, The
children learn, in glance and in song.
That love and kinship can thrive where means are not long.

Through labor and longing, the South carries its truth,
A tapestry of endurance, of resilience and youth,
Poverty may tighten its ever-present clasp,
But women build legacies that time cannot grasp.

Threads of sweat and soil, of sorrow and mirth,
Hold the quiet architecture of familial worth,
And in their daily motion, the world soft The
heartbeat of kinship is what labor bestows.

Root Doctor

Bottles and jars line the table, front to
back, a menagerie of colors crimson,
amber, earth-brown like portraits
weathered by time, hung in the dark
corridors of memory, unattended, yet
never forgotten.

Clay pots crowd the windowsills,
drunk on sunlight, their leaves
stretching toward the heat, first in
thirst, then in excess.
The air is thick with camphor, menthol,
burning the nose, salt stinging the eyes
tears of apprenticeship, tears of
knowing.

They come from everywhere,
pilgrims of need, hundreds of
miles by bus, by car, by
plane, drawn to her door by
whispers of cure.

It is the doctoring she is known for
the binding of a man’s wandering,
the loosening of a woman’s grip
on land, on flesh. Money is no
measure here; sometimes too
much, sometimes nothing at all,
for payment is not always coin.

She is no mind reader only God holds
that power. But her hands, her hands
know the language of leaves.

I watch them pluck green from the sill,
watch them stir bottles, pinch
powders, pour drops into the waiting
vessel. Each recipe is different, each
remedy a constellation
of earth and spirit, a medicine for
the lonesome heart, a salve for
faith gone thin.

She is the root doctor, the shaman of
the holler, her craft stitched from
silence, her cure carried in the breath
of plants, her power rising from the
soil itself.