State Route 116, Tennessee

1.
A friend played tour guide for me
when I visited from Montana,
took me on a drive
through the hollers of east Tennessee,
those close Appalachian hills,
those grim, pinched valleys.

From the bottom of the hollers, we couldn’t see
the coal mine above,
tearing up, blowing apart,
trucking away the top of the mountain.
My friend pointed out the drainage
where the mine above had bulldozed its waste rock.
He showed me the creek
that was poisoned and would stay poisoned.

2.
We took the state route through Fraterville,
where 216 coal miners – men and teenagers – died
in a mine explosion over a century before.
My guide described a note
scribbled by one miner
on a small piece of paper:
We are all praying for air,
Raise the children the best you can.
Bury me and Elbert in the same grave by little Eddy.
Oh God for one more breath.

Close to a thousand children lost their fathers
that day. I tried to comprehend the struggles
of those suffocating in the mine,
the pierced hearts of families above.

The road here is a black line on the map,
a dark road indeed.

3.
Back among the hollers,
invisible but for my friend’s knowledge –
an unmarked graveyard
discovered years after the last burial,
filled with the bodies of mostly black prisoners
leased out for profit by state prisons
to coal companies that also profited
by working these men to death,
keeping the deaths secret,
burying those men
in graves they thought would remain
undiscovered forever.

These dark roads and these dark valleys;
It’s a wonder (I reckoned
but didn’t say to my friend),
It’s a wonder
that the sun ever shines in this place.

* 

The Grave in Tyree Basin

Twin brothers born in 1916
to a family of homesteaders
in the Badlands.
One died within hours,
the other lived 91 years.

The family tried to scratch out a living, but
there was too little water, too little grass.
They left the baby’s grave behind
when they moved on.

Years later, someone
who never knew the family
walked the three miles in
from the road, carried
a small concrete marker there.

Now, someone else returns
from time to time, re-paints
four posts around the grave, maintains
a wire fence outside the posts.

A little sun-powered lamp there
creates a tiny light
on an empty plain.

These visitors are scarce,
but not the buffalo, coyote and
meadowlark. Sunshine is
abundant, wind is unimpeded.
Night is dark
and brilliant
and sings to the lonely.

*

Evening in the Sandhills

Two sweethearts lie atop
a haystack in the meadow
of a dry Nebraska ranch
and watch the round moon rise
in a dusty summer sky.

*

Steve Paulson lives in eastern Montana and reconnected with poetry after a career of environmental activism with Montana’s Northern Plains Resource Council. He has studied under Bernard Quetchenbach, Tami Haaland, and Cara Chamberlain; his essays have appeared in High Country News, Earth Island Journal, and various newspapers. He authored a non-fiction book – Environmentalists: An Eyewitness Account from the Heart of America.