Robert Charles Howard - Black Diamonds

Farmers flocked to Blossburg's mines
    willing their abandoned plows
    to perpetual dust and rain.

Burrowing into the Tioga hills,
    with Keagle picks and sledges,
    they filled their trams with rough cut coal.

Black diamonds - carved for waiting boilers
    of New England mills and trains
    and Pennsylvania's winter stoves.

Brothers, Frank and Asher swung their picks,
    in tunnels deep beneath the hills
    and brushed away the clouds of soot.

Their coughs at first seemed harmless,
    as from nagging colds or flus -
    but deepened as their lungs turned black.

Pain and choking drove them to their beds
    where no medic's art could aid them.
    Then the coroner came to seal their eyes.

A stonecutter's chisel marks their brevity
    on a marble graveyard obelisk
    that pays no homage to their sacrifice.

Robert Charles Howard

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