Hard
Hardburly. The name tells how life was here.
I was jerked up, hard, in a deep holler
where smoke from the smoldering gob pile hung in air
that smelled like carbide and warm dishwater.
Hardburly bullies roamed the camp.
Their fists broke my teeth before I worked
clanking shifts of hard coal seams and slabs,
bolting the dripping roof of gray jack rock.
Hard was that roof rock falling when the mine blew,
hard the dying, smothering in the dark.
“This is a real hard thing to have to do,”
the commissioner said, and read our names off a card.
Hard even the Hardburly burial.
They brought us out of darkness into night,
then to the cemetery on this rocky knoll.
They had to dig our graves with dynamite.
Jim Wayne Miller

















