Miner’s Lament
I wrote this poem as a tribute to my father, brother, uncles and other relatives and friends who worked in the anthracite coal mines in and near Pittston, Pennsylvania. Every line of the poem relates to one of them.
The poem won third place for poetry in the 2015 world-wide Writer’s Digest competition and was later featured in the 2016 edition of Voices and Visions: the OLLI at UCONN annual arts and literature review.
I hope to include it in a future collection of my poems and short stories. In the meantime, I offer it to you here as a literary gift.
Read the full text of the poem below.
Miner’s Lament
Pink: the color of sky,
blossom,
organ.
Pink, the day education ended
and heaven faded to black
in a cage dropping six hundred feet.
Pink, invisible in the darkness
save the lamps lighting the way
of blind mules, fat rats and sacrificial birds.
Dark pink after a year,
waiting in the blackness for each mule,
opening , closing, salvaging precious air.
Light grey after three years,
straddling chutes in the breaker’s deafening roar,
sifting stones in the black clouds.
Grey after seven years,
racing alongside two-tons of runaway coal car
with only sprags to stop them.
Dark gray after twenty years,
surviving black damp, white damp,
falling bells and singing timbers.
Black after thirty years,
wheezing up blood
and never smoked a damn day in my life.
I have developed a presentation based upon anthracite coal mining and the story behind “Miner’s Lament” called Life and Death in Black Hell and I have given presentations on it to groups from a couple dozen to a couple hundred. If you would like me to do one for your group, let me know via my Contact page.