Spoken Like Poetry


Spoken by Judy:

My daddy was a mountaineer before he was a coal miner.
God made mountaineers.
Man – and greed – made coal miners.
I’m sorry but that’s the truth.

My daddy mined coal to make money.
I prize my sense of being a mountaineer,
My sense of place more than I prize the money that coal mining brought,
And if I knew then what I know now,
I would rather my father have lived off the land.
I would rather not have had any materialistic things,
because my father suffered mightily from black lung.
It broke his body.
It broke him.
He died six months after he retired.

And coal does that to people.
It breaks a man’s back.
It breaks his spirit.
You see what it does to people –
That they’re willing to allow their children to be poisoned so that they can make a living.

Coal does bad things to you.



This material originally appeared in Plundering Appalachia: The Tragedy of Mountaintop-Removal Coal Mining. The book was edited by Tom Butler and George Wuerther and it was published by Earth Aware Editions in 2009. The material was printed as a transcript of a spoken interview. I copied the transcript verbatim then I edited it by simply changing the sentences in paragraphs to lines in a “poem”.

Emerald