Miles Away: My Love Letter to Mocksville, North Carolina
by Jacinta White
I am not there still I cannot escape
the years from you that have brought me
the clarity needed to discover and
uncover your bamboo roots
still growing in my grandparents’
neighborhood a few miles from the
plantation they never spoke of—
whose name is somewhere in our
family tree—on Maple Street
but it was Route 29 and Davie Street
unnamed roads and unpaved paths
that stuffed gravel in my throat
I spent the following winter coughing up
your roads have disappeared
and now redirect where I have walked
and run and cried when I split my toe
in two playing kickball that sticky
summer
I am not there still I cannot escape
memories of your honeysuckle bushes
beside St. John’s Church that hid me and
Charlese the night we smoked our first
cigarette
our Vacation Bible school teacher had
given us the night we tasted your rain that
couldn’t wash away our girlish giggles
there is no escaping memories
of me in your wind and in your roads
now buried underneath modernity
no monuments marking resurrected
recollections
gathered from the trip I took ending
in the center of a you I have yet to fully
know still I have fallen in love
with the pain of our past. My sun
stained skin and blackened knees
do testify
I am not there still I cannot escape
so I will surrender. Again and again
I promise to never deny you, but only
if this time you will let me breathe
