As a little girl growing up on the outskirts of Blacksburg, Virginia, I spent a lot of time visiting my mother’s family in Catawba Valley near Brush Mountain where Audie Murphy, the most decorated veteran of World War II, died in an airplane crash on May 28, 1971. I was eight years old, but his accident stayed with me because one of the boys who rode the school bus had hiked up to the crash site with his dad and found a severed finger in the rubble. One Friday, he brought that finger to school in a glass bottle for show and tell.
That boy’s mother was my grandma’s best friend, and both of our families lived “down the back road” which switches from Mount Tabor Road to Newport Road as it crosses the county line from Montgomery County into Catawba Valley. There, I was blessed to know several quiet men, grown wise and weary from war.
These were my mom’s uncles—Uncle Richard, Uncle Amos, Uncle Tom, and Uncle Johnny. All served honorably in Europe. The family thought Uncle Tom had it the roughest because he was lost for a while, imprisoned, and rumored to be dead for months before making it back to Catawba.
I knew Uncle Johnny best. After my brother’s debilitating encephalitis, he and Aunt Nora often visited us after we moved into our new brick rambler on Mount Tabor Road. We spent a lot of time at their house, too—a two-bedroom brick rambler sitting in a blind curve about five miles down the road past Aunt Nora’s homeplace which still stands at the mouth of a dark hollow laced by a creek branch trickling into Dry Run.
Uncle Johnny and Aunt Nora often invited their extended family to cookouts and summer family reunions where we played freeze tag and croquet in the front yard. They grew sweet Concord grapes on the hillside behind their house where he taught me to call the hogs out of the woods, so we could feed them buckets of table scraps and warm, steaming slop.
Sad to say, in May 1985, three months before I returned to Hollins College for a fifth year to earn a master’s in English literature and creative writing, Uncle Johnny committed suicide. Much of the time, he was a silent, faithful man who attended church on Sundays. He was the backbone of Mom’s extended family living down the back road, so when he spoke, Grandma Bessie and Grandad Burnette stopped whatever they were doing to listen.
Besieged by setbacks, my mom and dad stuck to his advice, too. I remember sitting on the floor with my brothers, all at rapt attention when he visited us, yet he stayed quiet most of the time and smiled while Aunt Nora did the talking about growing up by the hollow and her fear of lightning.
I don’t understand why Uncle Johnny committed suicide, but it’s not hard to imagine that living off the land in Appalachia as a boy and serving in the war left him little purchase for handling his unwelcome Parkinson’s diagnosis. For whatever reason, Uncle Johnny did not want to handle old age after all he had been through. Toward the end, he and Aunt Nora stopped visiting us, and they stopped going to church.
He died in the side bedroom down the hall from his living room, the same bedroom where I used to snoop during family reunions when I was a little girl. I used to sneak in there and stare at a wood-framed reproduction of “Jesus Knocking” hanging on the bedroom wall. When I stayed with Aunt Nora the weekend after his suicide, that image was still there: Jesus was standing just outside a wide, wood-slabbed door. It was the middle of the night, so he was holding a bright lantern. He was knocking on the door, but the door didn’t have a handle or a knob—no door knocker either.
***
On Dad’s side of the family, his brother Uncle Gervis was also a World War II veteran. He loved to play the guitar and sing when the mood hit him right on summer nights. Uncle Gervis lived in a one-bedroom brick rancher across the field from our house. Just like my dad, he spent most of his time finishing odd jobs for the professors in town. All of my uncles on my dad’s side of the family did odd jobs for the professors in town, and none of my family on either side, men or women, had been to college.
Along with living off the garden, raising a couple of heads of cattle and hogs, and fishing along New River, carpentry and masonry sustained us. Back then, you didn’t need a license or a college degree to make a living. You learned what you could from your father and uncles, got yourself a truck and some hand tools, and called yourself a carpenter, a builder, a stone mason, an auto mechanic. You were better off if you were lucky enough to work at the Radford Army Ammunition Powder Plant in Radford, Virginia, or at Litton Poly-Scientific, fine-tuning moveable technologies for spacecraft.
Uncle Gervis was never the same after he had returned from Europe, so he worked when he felt like it. His “Thundering Herd” had been driven hard through Europe, and they took plenty of fire as they cleaned out the woods. Uncle Gervis saw most of his friends die in combat, including his closest friend. According to my mom, what “broke him in half” was liberating the camps. He could not recover from seeing what had happened to all those beaten, starving prisoners in the concentration camps, and my dad often hushed him in the house when he started to talk about it.
Never the same, Uncle Gervis kept a mess of a house and yard, so we were not allowed to go inside his house—it was a jumble of clutter and cats, inside and out. However, in the middle of all chaos, his garden flourished, and he shared the best from what he grew with his family and neighbors.
Sometimes my dad would take my brothers and me fishing with Uncle Gervis after school. Most often, we went catfishing in New River, but none of us talked much once we got there, unless it had to do with keeping the hooks baited and thrown into the right place. We sat along the riverbank while the Coleman lantern sputtered, beaconing the fish to snatch our rotten-ripe chicken liver bait.
Uncle Gervis loved to fish. One day, he became a local hero for catching a citation muskie. Somewhere, he is still grinning and holding the muskie through the gills, barely able to lift it and keep its tail off the ground. If you don’t believe me, you can look up his photo in the archives of the Blacksburg Sun.
***
I cannot tell what exists beyond this black and white page. What lamentations? What joys? What stories and poems would veterans share if we stopped to listen? I have been teaching at a military college for thirteen years, but I did not really stop to think about veterans until I visited Pearl Harbor in November 2020 during the COVID pandemic when my sons surprised us with a trip to Hawaii. Thankfully, we decided to visit the Pearl Harbor National Memorial. No one who visits the memorial can forget the sacrifice war demands. Later, I wrote the first draft of this ekphrastic poem during Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project on December 8, 2024, shortly after my laureate appointment:
Pearl Harbor National Memorial
Around my neck, I wear a pearl of great cost.
The docent at the memorial helped me split it
from the tight-lipped oyster still-gasping for air
inside a tin pan of shallow saltwater: Pearl Harbor.
The jeweler drilled straight through the pearl,
straight through its calm pearlescence. He set it
dead center on a golden spindle in the middle
of a twisted and engraved eternity. Remembered like
twisting altars, twin windowpanes in the memorial
resemble bleached and broken crosses, giving up
all dead men from bloodshed’s beginning, not just
the burned men floundering and drowning that day
in the harbor. This bleached memorial is an architecture
of limbs, raising into whatever war befalls them.
These are great, suffering, purified limbs with hands
that reach for life. These are wrenched hands and fingers.
They rise toward the sky for consolation like hymns
escape the fires dancing across oily, suffocating waves.
***
In December 2024, after taking my oath to serve the Commonwealth of Virginia as poet laureate, Dr. Kathleen P. Decker, now president of the Poetry Society of Virginia (PSV), invited me to read at a holiday luncheon in Williamsburg, Virginia, held to honor Mr. Edward Warren Lull who died on November 2, 2024, after decades of serving the PSV. Born in North Wales, Pennsylvania, he grew up in Upstate New York and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1955, beginning a twenty-year Navy career where he served in submarines. That day, I did not know what to do with the laureate appointment.
Just as I was leaving, the poet Wayne David Hubbard approached me. He asked me what I had in mind for the laureate project. I told him I had no idea, so I decided to go on a “listening tour,” and the holiday luncheon was the first stop. As a former Marine, he had volunteered at the National Archives, where he realized there weren’t many veterans’ poems. He asked me to consider using the laureate project to serve veterans through poetry.
At first, I thought I didn’t know much about veterans, but with the support of veterans, fellow poets, and a community of agencies and nonprofits, I was able to design “Perseverance and Resilience: Supporting Veterans Through Poetry.” Now, over six months into this project, I am thankful for this opportunity to remember my uncles. The gravity of quietly living with experiences that they dare not put into words must have been unbearable.
This troubling issue percolates throughout our Veterans Poetry Project (VPP) activities as our facilitators break new ground with veterans who want to speak through poetry. Thanks to the Academy, we are learning how to scaffold stories from veterans’ silences–one syllable at a time. While veterans have much to say, what they say does not have to end in silent suffering. The project’s anthology Perseverance and Resilience, forthcoming in June 2026, celebrates veterans’ poems that constellate around perseverance and resilience the joys and the lamentations. However, these poems are just the beginning. I am excited to see what comes next for emerging veteran poets as they find their bearings and connect life’s dots through poetry.
Today, I want to finish this essay with a few lines from Steven L. London, the first-place winner of our 2025–26 VPP veterans’ poetry contest. His poem “I Remain,” celebrates the natural world as one source of his unfolding perseverance:
If I endure, it is because
I was never just one soldier—
I was the field, the sky, the turning stars.