Lightning Tortoise Thomas plucked
banjos and twanging guitars, mourning
his Blue Ridge Mountain home
where catfish drifted dead above the river
like pale socks, their ghosted mouths
puckered open as if to howl.
In Fort Worth he lived
homeless near Magnolia Street,
his fingers clustered across the strings
in the picking style of Mississippi John Hurt
and the voice of Lead Belly
warbling Goodnight Irene for hipsters
tossing coins and bills. As he sang
crickets stopped chirping, comets were summoned
over boiling streetlamps and white moths
dervished through the night air.
I remember, he said, when the world had a song.
Everybody murdered the melody
when people poisoned the singing birds.
The last meadowlark fell like a star
and we all kept breathing, unaware a person
could breathe and still be dead.
Strip mines blasted the stones down to dust
for shedding the loam’s blood, the coal
in machines coking human lungs.
Most Appalachian bluesmen
sleep below punctured earth
dreaming on graveyard pillows and our null tongues
forget their sorrows sweet as strawberries,
their songs’ perfume eddied in the wind.
Sometimes I ask myself, why live? I say
there’s no reason to sing anymore
than flowers have reason to bloom, Earth
doesn’t ask why she should spin, hummingbirds
patter their sequined wings and a blue moon
blazes in the birdless sky.
Read More:
How mountaintop mining affects life and landscape in West Virginia [Scientific American]
Eric Fisher Stone is a poet from Fort Worth, Texas who lives in Ames, Iowa where he is a graduate student at Iowa State University’s MFA in Writing and Environment program. His poems have appeared in various literary and online journals.
Image of mountaintop mining in Kentucky by Doc Searls on Flickr.
