JOURNAL EXCERPT: ‘Slow Omen’ – A Poem and Essay by H.C. McEntire

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.