| Craig Czury USA Czury@aol.com GOUGED EARTH / GOUGED PEOPLE January 22, 1959 the Susquehanna River burst through the roof of the Knox Mine, up from Wilkes-Barre, flooding the entire honey-comb of mines throughout the lower northern anthracite coalfield: 12 miners dead, thousands of miners out of work forever. I was 7 years old. Within 5 years our textile industry had moved south for cheaper labor...thousands of mill workers out of work or moved out of the region forever. i inherited the black-star hole
through each one of these window panes
I inherited the voices and attitudes of the men and women who were shut down and abandoned. A tremendous anger...a tremendous silence. One high school student, after listening to me read my poems about the gouged earth, gouged people, sulfur creeks and mountain of slag, asked me if i was an environmentalist. I flipped off the lights, opened the window, rearranged my chair ...hacking and smoking. COALSCAPE all this black dust black cinder and glass ground up in the spine of a torn-out trainbed smoke rising out of birch on the culm bank when it begins to rain a mountain breathing that hot it steams you tell us (blaise cendrars) to write is to burn alive yes but to fill our lungs with these words black dust white sulfur air UNCOVERING THE MINE SHAFT by accident we stumbled upon the last breath and knelt down our one good ear tight against its lips and rotted teeth we could not tell if it was night or the eclipsing sun but from somewhere deep within its wound we heard drums and a circle of clapping bones closing in again the woolly mammoth being roused from its black slumbering dust crude figures of men with sticks and mud-sling barrows illumined the cankerous mouth THE SHIPWRECKED we spoke a dead language when we arrived poured our lungs into tin pails and tossed what breath was saved back to the sea our behavior was harsh confused as if we¹d been set afloat for years without stars we built a house out of barrels draped the bent window with mice and the flathandle backs of scoops for the furnace slabbed a thin coat of peeling rust above the door our women dressed in finest smell of cabbage and linen brought over with us woven from black cigars there were shovels and round helmets with light we were told rescue the still-living washed undershore our names were shaved into pure white robes our tremendous wings grew inward like the two end tines of a fluttering pitchfork SHAMOKIN even the pigeons have a deeper meaning cooing like the throaty gasp of a woman under the tower of the old silkmill clock the moon and the silkmill clock lit by the same blood of the hour
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