POETRY
Hard Faith
We were born to red earth
and hand-me-down prayers,
to mothers who knelt in the fields
and called that kneeling faith.
Our fathers were men of silence,
their ghosts planted deep,
roots tangled in grief and duty,
their shadows stretching farther
than the cotton rows.
We learned to make peace
with what we couldn’t change,
the sky’s long refusal,
the way work wears down a name.
Still, there was music in it:
the creak of porch boards,
the low hum of a hymn
carried through supper steam.
The years came hard,
but so did laughter —
quick, bright, and gone too soon.
We buried our dead,
tilled the same soil,
and prayed the ground would remember
more than just our sorrow.
The ones who left carried dust
in the hems of their skirts,
the ones who stayed
learned to call the drought a season,
not a curse.
Either way, we kept tending
hope like a row of beans
we refused to let die.
Now I tell my daughters
that faith is not a church pew,
it’s a seed that outlives you,
a quiet thing
that keeps pushing through dry ground.
Kyler Littlejohn is a junior at the University of Texas at Tyler, majoring in Education with a minor in English. Inspired by a rural upbringing, her writing explores themes of faith, family, hardship, and love. Her work has previously been published in Tyler Junior College’s Bell Tower Arts Journal.
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Image: “Farmers at work” by Umberto Boccioni, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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