Shannon Blank: There’s a Valley Full of Sleepers

There’s a Valley Full of Sleepers

There’s a valley full of sleepers
Some say got stuck in the past,
Where there’s seven kinds of buggies,
Times seven kinds of fasts.

Yellow on the skylights,
And black below the eyes,
Brown around the edges,
Hedges blind against the sides.

Samson was a Weaver
And Delilah was a snare
When I saw them in the moonlight,
They were putting up her hair.

Delilah was a Weaver
And Samson was a bear
And when I came back in the morning
There wasn’t no one there.

The light is red
The stars are green
The foxes all aflame
I tried to wake my sister
But the sleep that she was
Sleeping
Had swallowed up her name.

When she came back in the
morning
She was never quite the same.

Shannon Blank is a young woman reading and writing in the border foothills of West Virginia.

Photography by Kenneth Godoy