Blood is Coal and other poems
Karen Newman
Blood is Coal
The Celts worked the mines unaware
that their kin would die young down there,
each in his own burial hole.
In Appalachia blood is coal.
The owners of the mines just care
about their money, not what’s fair,
as they play the Grim Reaper’s role
in Appalachia. Blood is coal
along country roads and highways
converted to a metal maze
of crushed lives overweight trucks stole.
In Appalachia blood is coal.
Stripped
I look out at the mountains,
brittle boned skeletons
devoid of color,
their black marrow removed
like a cancer and burned.
The beauty of my ancestral home
has faded unnoticed
like a young man over time,
until only empty shells remain
ready to crumble at a crow’s touch.
Each day I put on a dress of soot,
a hand-me-down
from mountains stripped of pride,
while my mind wears mourning jewelry
of weaved leaves.
Backyard Memories
Grass now grows
above a coal seam
bathed by the clear water
that once nourished cows.
A barn is the tombstone
of that old dairy farm
that casts shadows as black
as the coal underneath.
Every now and then
I see the black footprints
of the dinosaurs
embedded in the clay.
Karen L. Newman is the author of the poetry collections EEKU (Sam's Dot) and ChemICKals (upcoming from Naked Snake Press). Over 150 of her short stories and poems have been published since 2004, both online and in print. She's won the 2005 Kentucky Mary Jane Barnes Award and received two honorable mentions in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Please visit her online at
http://home.zoomnet.net/~karennew.
Photo "Graffiti Country" by Bella Dante.
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Poems Copyright © 2006 Karen Newman. All rights reserved.
Photo Copyright © 2006 Bella Dante. All rights reserved.
