Grandfather's Rocker

The creak of Grandfather’s rocker

on our wooden porch planks.

 

They have returned—the ghosts

of black-lunged miners

from a glossed-over wrinkle in time

when life was worn hard
as a vein of lead, its spirit subdued
under steel-toed boots
from The Company Store,
when Earth weighed heavily
on their chests, even before
the carbon tunnel cave-in,
its crushing vacuum compressing,
strangling, abducting their lives
breath by wheezing breath.

Until that day in 1940
when the whistle screamed,
“Don’t take a chance,
it may be your last.”


leh