Poems for April 7: Diane Fisher Celebrates Miners’ Lives and Culture

[Plastered across today’s headlines,  the worst mining disaster in some 20 years has claimed more than a score of lives. Here is a heart wrenching response to the lives of families entangled in this most dangerous of professions. Diane Fisher’s 1920 West Virginia is the same as in today’s headlines, the same that Barbara Kopple filmed 30 years ago in “Harlan County USA,” or that John Sayles’ “Matewan” brought to the screen, or that Aunt Molly Jackson and Mother Jones sang and organized  a century ago.  The book from which these three poems come, Kettle Bottom, screams and cajoles and spits with urgency.– Lew Rosenbaum]

Explosion at Winco No. 9

Delsey Salyer knowed Tom Junior by his toes,
which his steel-toed boots had kept the fire off of.

Diane Gilliam Fisher

Betty Rose seen a piece of Willy’s ear, the little
notched part where a hound had bit him
when he was a young’un, playing at eating its food.
It is true that it is the men that goes in, but it is us
that carries the mine inside. It is us that listens
to what they are scared of and takes
the weight of it from them, like handing off
a sack of meal. Us that learns by heart
birthmarks, scars, bends of fingers,
how the teeth set crooked or straight.
Us that picks up the pieces.
Us that picks up the pieces. I didn’t have
nothing to patch with but my old blue dress,
and Ted didn’t want floweredy goods
on his shirt. I told him, It’s just under your arm,
Ted, it ain’t going to show.
Ted, it ain’t going to show. They brung out bodies,
you couldn’t tell. I seen a piece of my old blue dress
on one of them bodies, blacked with smoke,
but I could tell it was my patch, up under the arm.
When the man writing in the big black book
come around asking about identifying marks,
I said, blue dress. I told him, Maude Stanley, 23.

Pink Hollyhocks

I turned the quilt over on the bed
when the neighbor women come in
to cover the mirrors and stop the clocks,

Perugia Press, 2004; 96 pp, $15.00

hang black crepe over the doorframe.

Onliest pretty thing I had, that quilt.

Not a old feedsack quilt, but a Wreath
of Hollyhocks, cut from Aunt Zelly’s
pattern and done up from a piece
of double-pink Mama brought me
from Kermit, soft Nile green for the leaves,
and new bleached muslin to put it on.
I quilted every inch, stitches no bigger
than a speck of meal. He wasn’t home,
night I finished. I put it on the bed,
took my clothes, and got under it.
When I heard him in the kitchen,
I called and told him it was done,
And you know what Mama says, Harlan,
you get a wish, first night under a new quilt.
It got real quiet, then here he come
running. I’d put out the light,
he knocked his shin on the cedar chest
trying to get to me on the bed.

I was fixing to fold it up, get it
out of my sight, when the siren blowed.
I didn’t go. I already knowed.
The quilt was ruint. Big oily smudges
and coal-black handprints where he hadn’t
finished washing up. I cried and carried on so
when I seen it that morning
he couldn’t look at me before he left,
it made him feel so dirty and bad.

I turned the quilt over on the bed
to keep them on me,
Harlan’s hands.

A Reporter from New York Asks Edith Mae Chapman, Age Nine,

What Her Daddy Tells her about the Strike
We ain’t to go in the company store, mooning
over peppermint sticks, shaming ourselves like a dog
begging under the table. They cut off our account
but we ain’t no-account. We ain’t to go to school
so’s the company teacher can tell us we are.
The ain’t going to meeting and bow our heads
for the company preacher, who claims it is the meek
will inherit the coal fields, instead of telling
how the mountains will crumble and rocks
rain down like fire upon the heads
of the operators, like it says in the Bible.
We ain’t to talk to now dirtscum scabs
and we ain’t to talk to God. My daddy
is very upset with the Lord.

From Kettle Bottom (Perugia Press, 2004), By Diane Gilliam Fisher

Poet Diane Gilliam Fisher refuses to shy away from the complexities of history, instead using story to illuminate a multiplicity of truths. Her newest work, Kettle Bottom, re-imagines the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920–1921 through the voices of immigrant, miners, and their families. In taking on the voice of each character that populates the work’s larger historical narrative, Fisher brings intimacy, immediacy and compassion. . . (read more at the Smith College Poetry Center site)