Bounty

Bullace and scuppernong

Wild flavours and perfumes

Important among harvests.

Wild strawberry and low-bush huckleberry.

Perfume of chionanthus and sweetshrub,

Better than barter and trade,

Sky-song of geese,

Pattern of butterfly wings, bearing no bar code –

Early remembrance they,

Glad of return

Renewing the mind, in circling year,

Past all beginnings,

Beyond all stars.

James Everett Kibler

James Everett Kibler is a novelist, poet, and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he taught popular courses in Southern literature, examining such figures as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and Larry Brown. Born and raised in upcountry South Carolina, Kibler spends much of his spare time tending to the renovation of an 1804 plantation home and the reforestation of the surrounding acreage. This home served as the subject of his first book, Our Fathers’ Fields: A Southern Story, for which he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction in 1999 and the Southern Heritage Society’s Award for Literary Achievement.