Twenty-Nine Days to Salem

TWENTY-NINE DAYS TO SALEM: A POETRY ATLAS is a collection of poems I wrote following my experience as a through walker in The Journey To Salem, a 500+ mile walk from Bethlehem, PA to Winston-Salem (Old Salem), NC in the Fall of 2021. Our small group of women retraced the steps that a small group of primarily young Moravian girls walked (along with horses and wagons) and a handful of adults, including one man (maybe 2), in 1766. Their trip led to the founding of my high school Alma...
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TWENTY-NINE DAYS TO SALEM: A POETRY ATLAS is a collection of poems I wrote following my experience as a through walker in The Journey To Salem, a 500+ mile walk from Bethlehem, PA to Winston-Salem (Old Salem), NC in the Fall of 2021. Our small group of women retraced the steps that a small group of primarily young Moravian girls walked (along with horses and wagons) and a handful of adults, including one man (maybe 2), in 1766. Their trip led to the founding of my high school Alma Mater, Salem Academy and College, in Winston-Salem, NC in 1772. My poems are rooted in the geography of the route. They provide some insight into the physical journey, but more importantly the emotional part of the journey, and the seemingly inexplicable connection I felt to the girls who had walked the route before. Our group undertook the Journey this year to celebrate the 250th year of Salem Academy and College, and to ignite Her future. The collection contains main poems that are rooted in the geography of the route and also "side poems" that invite the reader to explore some topics further. It includes information about our Journey in a visual display, with tables of statistics, simple pie charts illustrating the data, my route as collected on strava, with elevation profiles and weather data for our journey, as well as for the previous Journey when it was available. The book is sprinkled with quotes taken from the translated version of a diary that was kept on the original Journey, in 1766, by a 16 year old girl named Salome Muerer.