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Sharon Perkins Ackerman
My Grandfather Dug Coal
To be your granddaughter is to know
the mountain as torn, plowed,
blasted down to a darkness
different than night,
the kind where you dream
seams of garnet left by stars.
Not just a combustible hunk
of cold, not just one way out,
and a ceiling of shale ready
to choke-damp the tunnel
between you and your seven kids.
Because of you, the sky opens
into lapis, sun showers the gliding chair
where I sit and watch beetles
clamber from small shafts,
the voles soft ramble toward
an exit I can never seem to find.
You didn’t know you’d die at thirty-three,
you just kept
swinging that big lamp
toward the outbye at quitting time,
burrowing up toward light.