Haunting of the Early Coal Miners

art by Amari Becker

by Susan Wheatley

No feelings attach to this sentence.
That's a wonder, not easy in this
medium where lines break and fall,
as when the ropes of early English
coal miners broke in the shafts.

The miners dreaded the goblins
on the tunnel walls—but those were
only fossils, something they didn't know
then. They only had candlelight.

The wonder is that they kept
going down. O dark, dark, dark.
They all go into the dark, said Eliot
(who said everything and its opposite
if you look, like the Bible). He wasn't
talking about miners, but about
captains of industry and their ilk.
The point is the same except
for who had the power, who could
have changed things, could have
refrained, but made, as we say,
other choices.

Unions did come, laws did change,
but one coal miner still dies per X
degrees that I heat my house,
per Y degrees that I heat the earth.

The same earth that fell in on them,
that still sometimes falls in on them.

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Susan Wheatley's poems have been published in the Seattle Review, Stand (UK), Poor Yorick, the Cincinnati Review and other magazines. Her interview of poet Ellen Hinsey appeared in Poetry International. She reviews poetry books, and her reviews have appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, MQR Online and thePN Review (UK). Susan lives in Cincinnati where she practices probate law pro bono and works in the community on environmental matters.