Peggy Hale Bilbro

Good Earth

My grandfather was once a handsome young rogue who regularly terrorized the little Mississippi town where he lived. He entertained us with stories of playing chicken on horseback and gallivanting around the countryside with his pals. Schooling seems to have been just a few years before he quit and started working the family farm. Then came the stories of long hours and hard labor on worn-out Mississippi soil for pennies in return. 

Eventually he settled down, met the woman he loved and married, and with her he fathered six children. Then he did what any young man with gumption and dreams did. He moved his young family out west where there was land, and more endless labor as he dug out tough mesquite and broke hard soil to farm, this time on his own land with hope for a better future for his family. 

He led his wife and six children through the dust bowl, the long depression years, and several wars, always watching the sky for rain, seeing his cotton wither or thrive, raising clouds of dust from his old tractor. He persevered and thrived, and made sure his six children would have the education they needed to never have to labor that hard. He refused to bless my marriage until I had finished my college education. Now, his descendants make their homes across America.

weathered hands
cupped around a coffee mug
his story

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Peggy Hale Bilbro and her husband divide their time between Huntsville, Alabama, and Guardia Sanframondi, Italy. Her poetry reflects her life-long interest in the large and small miracles of the world, from dust bunnies to stardust, from mouse holes to black holes. She finds pleasure in the creative challenge of translating those miracles into poetry.

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