“The Chickens Have Died But 5 Goslings Have Hatched”

Ginny Lowe Connors created “The Chickens Have Died But 5 Goslings Have Hatched” from a letter written by M. A. Terrel in 1874. Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Ginny Lowe Connors writes:

This found poem comes from a family collection of very old letters that I have in my possession, written to my third great-grandmother, Rebecca Ann Applewhite Blankenship. The family lived on a farm in Tennessee, but a few years after the end of the Civil War, Rebecca, a widow, moved with her daughter Hattie and Hattie’s young husband to a cabin in Arkansas.

They were in Arkansas by the time Rebecca received a letter, from which this poem is drawn, from her young niece.