In the Aftermath: A Dove

“And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.”

—Genesis 11

On September 27, the glorious Appalachian autumn of 2024 was desecrated by Hurricane Helene as it marauded through western North Carolina—and its neighboring states of Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia—and left in its wake unimaginable devastation and heartache. A friend of mine, John Hoffman—resident of decimated Black Mountain, in North Carolina’s Swannanoa Valley, and a helicopter pilot in Vietnam from 1971 to 1972—confided: “The comparisons to a war zone are apt. Our roads have craters and collapse areas that appear as they did in [Vietnam] after an artillery strike.” Then, just one month and eight days after Helene, the U.S. presidential election was staged. For many, it’s impossible not to conflate Helene and November 5.

The landscape was blighted: rent trees on their backs by the tens of thousands; amnesiac water run amok; great brown vertical gashes where slopes had metamorphosed into mud and slid from their altitude; countless tableaux of massacred homes, farms and automobiles; and plenty of instances where places had simply vanished—nary a trace. Estimates vary, but more than 250 people died as a result of Helene, the deadliest hurricane since Katrina in 2005. The inhabitants of the creature-world, Animalia, were in many instances left homeless and in mortal peril. Early estimates suggest well over a million and a half farm animals perished. Rainfall was prodigious, record-setting. The vast arterial waterways of Appalachia rushed over their banks and swept off in great roiling crescendo everything in their path. An interminable “dark night of the soul” followed—and the very real worry that, perhaps, this year spring would forsake these parts, so subverted had been the natural order of the ecosystem. After all, a murderous hurricane, with an entourage of tornadoes, had inexplicably, and with all the valence of a Biblical imprimatur, defied elevation and invaded our mountains.

Yet spring arrived, perhaps reluctantly but no less shimmering, near-blinding, emerald, with all the miraculous promise that spring heralds: the bluest skies, plush clouds sailing the ridges, bluebirds, goldfinches, red-wing blackbirds, baby black snakes, rabbit kits, iris, dogwood and kousa, daisies, roses, phlox, blackberries across the swales, white blossoms sprayed from their thorny purple canes, the blue heron ascending majestically from its creek-bed hideout. And now, the summer solstice upon us, there are ragged robins, yarrow, wild carrot, Queen Anne’s lace, day and foolscap lilies, tiny lavender and yellow butterflies, morning cloaks, and of the mushrooms I reckon, chanterelles and black trumpets. Grass grows visibly, sonically. Of a dew-drenched morning, delicate gossamer webs woven by funnel spiders nest in it. Rainbows arc over the valleys.

Spring has kept its timeless promise despite humankind’s inability to keep ours. I’ve never studied a season this closely, so apprehensive was I that the earth had finally turned its back on us. Yet many trees still rest uneasily in their oversoaked root saddles, and, just yesterday, after the latest storm, a four-storey elm crashed down in our yard. Folks still hold their breath when the wind roars, thunder sounds, and rain plummets. What’s more, many of the evacuated folks across Appalachia have not been able to return to their homes, and in all likelihood never will, especially those—as is always the shameful case—most vulnerable and without the requisite wherewithal to return, to rebuild.

The poems in Had I a Dove have a wonderful range: dire, elegiac, eulogistic, solemn, guardedly hopeful, and rooted lovingly, proudly, in the Appalachian earth. They all strike me as beautifully contemplative, prayerful. Some invoke other floods that have ravaged Appalachia over the years. Make no mistake, however: While this marvelous anthology grieves, as well it should, and necessarily tackles the trauma Helene wrought (it remains with us—physically, psychically, spiritually—though the spell of spring, and soon summer, has cloaked much of the carnage), it is not a catalogue of despair. It is not a requiem. Au contraire. Had I a Dove is rife with resilience, regeneration, vigilance, awe. These poems of witness ring with urgency, each a litany that adheres closely to Carolyn Forché’s injunction that a poem of witness is “an event and the trace of an event” that calls “for a shared sense of humanity and collective resistance,” that “its mode is evidentiary rather than representational—as evidentiary, in fact, as spilled blood.” In his essay “Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public?” Martín Espada, states: “Poems of communal grief may also … connect us with a community, either an immediate circle whose faces mirror our own, or a larger human collectivity, grounded in some essential empathy, without which none of us truly survives.”

Had I a Dove provides the necessary ritual of “communal grief” and witness to the indomitable spirit of all those extraordinary, valiant, land-tithed-and-beholden folks and their communities that well in concentric circles into the vast reaches of Appalachia. Witness permits clarity: cosmos out of chaos. Ultimately, this volume is a kind of praise song. It’s essential to “give sorrow words,” as Malcolm says to Macduff in Macbeth, lest “the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break.”

But the work is not over. The natural world is atrophying at an alarming, even fatal, rate. The relentless, willful assault on the climate, which spawned Helene and so many other unnatural catastrophes, is a bitter, ongoing fact. The earth remains its own witness as we grieve and wonder what is next, distraught that “the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …” Yeats’s famous poem, invoked so often, resists cliché. Perennially au courant—lo, these years and years since he penned it—it is the kind of cautionary tale and call to action that poetry habitually delivers. It’s what Had I a Dove so brilliantly delivers: a covenant that memory shall prevail; that the plucked olive leaf remains the symbol of peace, hope, and rebirth; that, as the late Appalachian poet Jackson Wheeler, in his poem “Ars Poetica,” underscores: “Words bear witness.”

Joseph Bathanti
Vilas, North Carolina
June 19, 2025

Introduction

The Appalachian Mountains, the oldest mountains on Earth and a temperate rainforest, have seen minor earthquakes, high winds, blizzards, forest fires, and dangerous thunderstorms. Recently, natural disasters here seem more unnatural, as on September 26–27, 2024, when tropical hurricane Helene brought record-breaking rainfall and high winds, felling trees and causing mudslides and catastrophic flooding that extended across Appalachia in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Undeniably, the hurricane was caused by the greenhouse effect and global warming. But, as Appalachian poets know full well, the exploitation of natural resources in the region have caused deforestation and mountaintop removal, which exacerbated the effects of wind and water wrought by Helene. The hurricane also caused the inconsolable loss of life and livelihoods, property, landmarks, landscapes, pets, farm animals, and wildlife.

Although we had warning of the hurricane, the common refrain after the flood was, “I wish I had been better prepared.” In the mountains, we are used to filling pots and jugs with water in anticipation of losing power for hours, even a day or so, due to high winds, ice or snowstorms. But we couldn’t have foreseen weeks—even months for some—of no water, no power, no Wi-Fi or cell phone service, no open stores, and widespread road closures, making it difficult to get provisions.

Like Dorothy after her house fell on the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, neighbors stumbled outside in disbelief. Even the sky seemed confused about tragedy—it was bright blue, and the air was pleasantly warm. Amid the cognitive dissonance, people often had difficulty remembering what day of the week it was. Then, someone would affirm, “I’m pretty sure it’s October.”

Even sound seemed displaced. The sound of the Watauga River gorge was replaced by water rushing everywhere it had never been before. Chainsaws buzzed from all directions. The harsh decibels of generators echoed from every holler, and the low helicopters worried us with a sound reminiscent of war. In contrast, insects, birds, and animals were stone quiet for several days. Did they simply retreat? Were they washed away? A week later, howling coyotes ran disturbingly close to the house. I could hear their footsteps by the deck. Scattered in the breeze, yellowjackets buzzing chaotic without nests, sound itself appeared homeless and in the Anger phase of the Stages of Grief.

I could tell the various stages of grief poets were going through when I started receiving submissions for this anthology. My preliminary call for submissions in January 2025 rendered little response. Simply, there had not been enough time. Though, some poets were compelled to write to process or witness, others felt survivor’s guilt. Many were too exhausted to write during the physical labor of mucking, removing trees or debris, volunteering at distribution centers, helping elderly neighbors with filling out forms or providing meals. Navigating to volunteer sites on dangerous roads, without markers to denote sudden crumbling drop-offs or under A’s of two trees having fallen into each other’s arms, often took hours rather than minutes. As poems came in, I could feel a collective grief in the common threads of emotion, fear, and imagery: exhaustion, insomnia when it rains, fallen trees, and downed powerlines.

At first, I wanted to include only Appalachian poets directly affected by the Helene Flood to tell our own stories, especially since a celebrity had come in the immediate aftermath to film a flood documentary. Repeatedly, he remarked that these people never complain. What if we did complain? We had experienced the flood, and then the election results like the flood all over again with daily flooding of “shock and awe” ever since.

Again, a second flood within three years struck Eastern Kentucky, affecting the beloved Hindman Settlement School that hosts the annual Appalachian Writers Workshop. I remembered the poets in West Virginia who had also suffered flooding as a direct result of strip-mining and mountaintop removal (recently, West Virginia flooded again). Contemporary Appalachia is inclusive and many reached out from our own loss to those experiencing fires in California. What the poets in this anthology, whether considered Appalachian or not, share most is a deep affection for the region, its inhabitants, the culture, the environment, and a belief in equity, diversity, and scientific facts.

The morning of the flood, my son followed the waterfall churning down the last quarter mile of our steep driveway that forged a new path to the Watauga River below. He returned with the outlandish report that the floodwater was full of pumpkins: pumpkins held under and gasping for air by a tortuous river that had vanquished our swimming hole. Before the flood, I had driven past a quaint farm with pumpkins on display for a fall event in Valle Crucis, where the Watauga wends past the community park and the historic Mast Store, miles upstream from my house. The thought of pumpkins now helpless on the ophidian river reminded me of an old black-and-white film on how to evacuate a hospital on fire. A lone nurse demonstrated spreading a sheet on the nursery floor. She quickly centered about twenty babies on the sheet. Easily, she pulled all those babies to safety. When the lights came back on, nursing students were wiping their tears.

When the lights finally came back on, we had to wipe our tears, assess the loss, and focus on recovery. Perhaps those pumpkins let loose by the Watauga River represented a kind of rescue—waves flipping like pages of an instruction manual on how to find hope. Maybe those pumpkins are a metaphor for poems let loose in publications while the poet never knows if they will reach someone—or matter if they do. Maybe a pumpkin will eventually grow in someone’s yard in Johnson City from a Valle Crucis seed. Perhaps a dear poet there who could not write about the flood will make a pie to nourish friends and family. Other seeds, maybe comfrey, stickweed, and spicebush, might create a new ecosystem along the banks of the Mississippi or the Gulf of Mexico. Perhaps I no longer see someone dressed in white as a lone rescuer, because I witnessed my community and so many volunteers taking action. Maybe all those pumpkins on that river-rollercoaster-ride were saving themselves by their very mode of travel—by spreading diversity.

The day before the flood, my son and his partner had announced they were expecting my first grandchild. Born months after a flood called Helene, a name meaning shining light, my granddaughter is a beacon of joy and resilience. I hope joy can be derived from these poems that became a part of my own processing—that their wisdom will take root and help heal the trauma caused by a world shaken upside down.

Hilda Downer
Sugar Grove, North Carolina, July 16, 2025