Poem: "There’ll Be a Tomorrow"
(For Clifton and Mary Bryant)
In all my wanderings
I’ve gone most to the poor
who are adept at hiding pain.
Sometimes the mountain man
does it stolid, ox-like,
revealing scant emotion.
But I know there is a cry inside
a flute song hungering for words
and maybe a curse...
On Cabin Creek I eat and sleep
in the makeshift home
of a disabled miner.
Hurt lies heavy on the house
but the deepest hurt is still unworded.
There is a today on Cabin Creek—
ghost town mining camps
miners who sit idle
drawing DPA checks
while machines drag coal from under the mountains
and bulldozers tear the mountains down
mixing with cesspool creek filth—
a today swallowed in poverty’s greedy gullet.
There was a yesterday on Cabin Creek
Paint Creek, Matewan, Logan—
yesterday with heroes, heroines and hope—
Mother Blizzard, Mother Jones
and women ripping up rails and crossties
that the Baldwin Felts armored train
might not pass,
a yesterday with Bill Blizzard
and a hundred others indicted for treason
by courts doing corporation bidding,
a yesterday with Steve Mangus shot dead
and the long march to Logan.
Seven thousand Kanawha Valley miners
with rifles, shotguns and pistols
on the long march to Logan...
Source: Don West, Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry, 1950-1999, 2000.
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