Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Alicia Hoffman
Alicia Hoffman currently teaches English at Bishop Kearney High School in Rochester, New York. Her poetry has been recently published in the following print and electronic journals: Poetry Midwest, Whimperbang, The Flask Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Remark, and Redactions: Poetry and Poetics.
Coal
This is backwoods West Virginia, where roads twist and snake, past
and present converge on corner lots, ramshackle trailers run past
New River Gorge to long deserted mining towns
founded on coal and steam, businessmen and bankers, hoteliers and
harlots all full of soot, the moneyed dream of C & O railway and beyond
Fayette County, the rapids are a distant roar mistaken
by this northerner for traffic. It’s a pleasant surprise, the air
sweet with honeysuckle, the mountains ripe at dusk.
On the tracks, you stoop, grasp a lump of coal in your hand,
toss it to drown in white water, foaming and hungry for something.
I find my own black clump littered along the track, and
if I were not so small against the backdrop of a mammoth hill
(Pinocchio in the belly of the whale) and if Appalachia lore did not whisper
hope and loss through the brick of this building abandoned by the behemoth
of time, and if I never met your nascent uncle, that hillbilly raconteur, conjurer
of family prosperity gone bad, the legerdemain of black lung, your father’s
untimely demise, it would have never ended up here, for I would have done the same.
But now it is here, where we are, and because of that, this
insignificant earth glistens with what it has taken, sweats
with the compacted life it has given and it has given up. This is what burns,
what heats, what steals and kills. This is what creates. Now, I want to fill
the entire Modern Museum of Art with coal, I want coal tumbling
out of third floor windows, I want installations of small flecks of coal
hanging on the walls of white rooms. I want to hand coal to strangers
fighting in wars I don’t approve and I want to fling coal
at sleeping people on the bus. This is a gift, I’ll say – here, don’t burn it,
don’t you see – this carbon dated test thing is your last breath, so brittle you could
crumble it between your teeth, take a chunk, though save it for now, for now it is yours.
