An Ode to Coal by Lee Allred
by Jonathon | 2.19.13
Black seams skitter
Through mantled rock,
Crisscrossing mountains.
Encrusted veins of blackened heart
Hide within its poisoning death
Until exhumed by grave diggers,
Faces black with toil-worn greed.
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Black smoke bellows
In high desert air,
Seeding clouds.
Sooted walls of blackened lung
Hide within its poisoning death
Until exhaled by grave fillers,
Faces white with aged fate.
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Infant heart struggles
Within plastic tent
As bellowed tubes and gauges pump
And beat louder than Death’s blackened wing.
Piston-power cremation-called
Hides within its poisoning death
Until excised by wondrous grave emptiers,
Faces pink with reborn life.
______________________________________
Lee Allred lives alone in a small gray house on headlands overlooking the windswept Oregon Coast. Lee has lived and travelled extensively across the globe. He is a professional fiction writer and much of his published work incorporates poetry—lines from the classics and lines from his own.
Photo by Jack Corn, 1974, via Wikimedia Commons: “First shift of miners at the Virginia Pocahontas Coal Company Mine #4 near Richlands, Virginia, leaving the elevator.”
February 21st, 2013 at 10:37 am
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Every two or three months I swing by WIZ and catch up and this trip has been particularly rewarding. Nice job, Lee.
February 21st, 2013 at 11:18 am
It’s nice work, Lee: imagist and political, but reservedly so. Like journalism is supposed to be. Thanks for sharing.
February 21st, 2013 at 9:39 pm
An interesting poem to read. In a way, it reminds me of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in how it gives us a whirlwind tour of our involvement in a web of interrelationships.
That makes you the guide ghost, Lee.