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| Downtown Wilkes-Barre, PA, early 1950s |
Proem
Their lives are part of my life’s inventory;
my role grows smaller when I glimpse the whole.
Today I pocketed a lump of coal.
These are the facts, but facts are not the story.
~David Mason, from Ludlow
Taking Stock
By the middle of the twentieth century,
“King Coal” had been dethroned by natural gas
and oil. In a place tagged Diamond City,
daily life had lost much of its luster.
But to the sad eyes of a little girl,
taking in the glitz of movie house
marquees mirrored in the rain-slicked street
of Public Square that blustery April night,
her Trailways slowly rolling toward the station,
Wilkes-Barre spangled, scintillated, shone.
No one had told the little girl, back then,
that Yankee blood was coursing through her veins,
nor that the subject of the “Doodle” ditty
had anything at all to do with Rose,
the woman sitting stern and ramrod straight
in that old gilt-framed sepia photograph
hanging on an uncle’s parlor wall.
It was the present moment, nothing more―
a father far away with polio.
A North-End double-block. A soothing thumb.
That night, the little girl slept unaware
that over nine-score years had come and gone
since Rachel Tyler Munson was interred,
unmarked, along the Susquehanna’s banks,
her children fleeing for their lives; a time
when Eton Jones would chip the glistening rock
from local outcrops for his blacksmith forge,
long before the Knox Mine tragedy.
A time when rival passions for the land
burned like the hot blue flame of anthracite.
