(For Clifton and Mary Bryant) In all my wanderings I’ve gone most to the poor who are adept at hiding pain. Sometimes the mountain man does it stolid, ox-like, revealing scant emotion. But I know there is a cry inside a flute song hungering for words and maybe a curse... On Cabin Creek I eat and sleep in the makeshift home of a disabled miner. Hurt lies heavy on the house but the deepest hurt is still unworded. There is a today on Cabin Creek— ghost town mining camps miners who sit idle drawing DPA checks while machines drag coal from under the mountains and bulldozers tear the mountains down mixing with cesspool creek filth— a today swallowed in poverty’s greedy gullet. There was a yesterday on Cabin Creek Paint Creek, Matewan, Logan— yesterday with heroes, heroines and hope— Mother Blizzard, Mother Jones and women ripping up rails and crossties that the Baldwin Felts armored train might not pass, a yesterday with Bill Blizzard and a hundred others indicted for treason by courts doing corporation bidding, a yesterday with Steve Mangus shot dead and the long march to Logan. Seven thousand Kanawha Valley miners with rifles, shotguns and pistols on the long march to Logan...
Source: Don West, Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry, 1950-1999, 2000.