William John Watkins

This is the crossroads
where the pole-mounted cart wheels
with their burden of broken criminals,
that interminable line like telephone poles
dwindling into the valley,
the one that stretches back
down the waterless mountain road
interrupted at intervals by crow cages
full of half picked bones,
is supposed to stop,
where the heel bruising stones
are supposed to turn to grass underfoot,
and the incline become horizontal.
But you know already
that Supposed-To-Be has little to do with Is,
and this is in fact only the place,
where the foothills end,
where the struggle to prepare
becomes the struggle to achieve,
and eventually, the struggle to survive.
And I do not have to tell you,
you who have struggled always
up the sheerest slope,
over rocks greased with your own blood,
that it is the struggle
and not the resting place,
however high up,
that makes us men,

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS

My father woke up startled every time,
as bug-eyed as Fuseli’s nightmare horse,
as if around him the collapsing mine
crushed on him still with overwhelming force.

As if plucked back by magic from the dead,
like undead Lazarus stunned for breath he sat,
looked at the plaster cracking overhead
for one last fatal tremblor in the shaft.

Sweat soaked, stiff, on the bed edge he would sit,
hands clenched in covers as if dug in dirt
still hearing in his mind-mine’s creak and sift,
the cave-in that they pulled him from “unhurt”.

Done with the mines, the mines weren’t done with him.
Each coal grit breath a lost lung’s rough raked rasp,
years later still as desperate and grim,
my father always woke up with a gasp.

Child ignorant, I never knew to thank
my dad, who fought back daily from the dead,
for shaking off the dream from which he shrank
to go back underground to earn our bread.

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS

My father buried to the neck in coal,
when the blast he set went off too soon
and the shaft sluiced rock like water roaring down,
pouring it over him in a rattling stream
until only his head could move,
hung suspended there an hour or more
before somebody came and raised the cry.

Men came, pickaxed and scraped
the brittle fist-sized shards of anthracite,
whose weight, like someone sitting on his chest,
squeezed off all breath except the hollow wheeze
his waning strength forced in and out.

He seemed a drowning man to those who dug
black diamonds by the shovelful and hurled
a month’s pay down the gangway in less time
than bosses would allow a man to eat.

No doubt, they marveled as they dug
at fortune turned bad like a tainted wish,
how months a man could shovel only stone
dreaming of a run of coal like that
to have it come a curse and leave him like
a miser buried in his bin of coins.

He laughed at that when I was old
as he was when good fortune broke three ribs,
and left the seam he’d spent six months to prime
for other men to dig.
“God loves a joke,” he said,
emphysema filling up his lungs,
the wet cough rattling in his chest
like running coal.

©WILLIAM JOHN WATKINS