Before the Light Came for the Holler's

They came to Appalachia with surveys before they came with steel,

walking the ridge lines, stopping, writing, looking,

as if the mountains would answer to their numbers.

🏔️🌲💡

They marked the ground beneath oaks, poplar, maples,

spoke of data centers as if already present,

as if the land had been waiting to become them.

🏔️🌲💡

In the hollers, rows of corn once followed the bend of the earth,

hands moving through soil that carried season after season,

and a hawk crossing the gap could tell what weather would follow.

🏔️🌲💡

That knowing stayed close to the body,

passed from one set of hands to another,

until it lived beneath thought,

like the memory of a road taken a thousand times.

🏔️🌲💡

Now the trees fall in a single stretch of hours,

and ground that carried corn stands leveled and sealed.

A data center rises in straight lines,

walls holding rows of servers,

fans turning without rest,

heat lifting steadily into the morning.

🏔️🌲💡

The streams run changed, their courses carrying warmth

through channels that once held a colder flow.

Salamanders slip from those waters,

leaving the stones bare where they once held still.

🏔️🌲💡

What gathered here over ages

is set into motion again in a season of contracts,

numbers spoken far from these ridge lines,

decisions made by hands that have never turned this soil.

🏔️🌲💡

I keep thinking of how quickly it happens,

how one morning still belongs to trees

and the next holds nothing of them at all.

🏔️🌲💡

The hollers still lie between the ridges,

yet the old ways of speaking begin to thin,

names for certain bends of land, certain qualities of light,

carried by fewer voices each year.

🏔️🌲💡

Mailboxes stand along the road,

names once spoken daily now seen only in passing,

Tipton, Shelton, Norton, Gosnell,

their sound lingering longer than their presence.

🏔️🌲💡

At night the data centers hold their own brightness,

steady, unblinking,

a field of light that answers only to demand.

The oaks, the poplar, the maples move through their seasons,

leaves turning as they always have,

though the ground beneath them answers to something else.

🏔️🌲💡

I walk these roads and feel what remains shifting through me,

the memory of use still present in the curve of each turn,

yet carrying no promise forward.

🏔️🌲💡

Somewhere a voice describes these mountains

to someone who has never stood here,

offering details carefully, one by one,

and hearing, even as they speak,

how much is already gone from what they mean.

🏔️🌲💡

And still the telling continues,

even as the distance grows,

even as the place itself

moves further into what it is becoming.

Author's note:

🏔️ — Mountains: endurance, deep time, the land as something ancient and steady

🌲 — Trees/forest: living presence, growth, rooted memory; here it points to the oaks, poplar, maples, and the silent loss of what once filled the ridges and hollers

💡 — Artificial light: human systems, energy, demand; in the poem it speaks of the data centers, constant power, and the replacement of natural rhythms with something built and unceasing