Spoken Like Poetry
(2 of 4)

Spoken by Pam:

Speaking as a person in education,
Recently in the news they’ve been putting out all these reports that the counties
Richest in coal are the
Poorest counties in the state.

We should have every piece of technology in the world in this school.
Our school should not do without anything.
We didn’t even have enough money to pay for a music teacher this year.
That’s not progress.
I had a music teacher when I went to school forty years ago.

These kids shouldn’t have to do without anything.
They’re hauling all that coal out of here,
And the kids are suffering these consequences,
And they can’t play on their roads;
They have no sidewalks.
Our schools should be state-of-the-art,
And we don’t have a music teacher.


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