Shadows in the Mountains
By Maryann Hamm
Have you ever taken a narrow reddog road
deep into West Virginia’s hills and hollers.
where once thriving families lived…
a road that ends at silent fields of coal?
In their stead now flourishes abundant vegetation,
illusive animal life, their borrows and nests
concealed in shrubs,
trees of dogwood,
crab apple
and oaks.
Rose of Sharon and tiger lilies
once tended by a woman's hand, grow feral,
resting on cement steps that climb to a void
as vapors rise from the ground.
We glimpse in eerie shadows
a porch and a house that once held laughter and grief
and the woman who made it a home.
A limestone hillside mottled with soft green moss,
seeps and trickles cold clear water.
The wellspring filled with tears
of love, and of loss shed through generations
widowed by the now still mines.
In the mountain’s mist, the shadow of miners
long gone, amble. The clanking of lunch buckets
a rhythmic echo from the past.
At dark, hardhat carbide lanterns light ghostly shadows
merge with the flight of the fire fly.
For sons and daughters who left their mountain roots,
a paradox remains
within their souls.
A pain hidden by the mountain’s beauty
drove them to the furthest corners of the earth…
they found it matters not.
A whippoorwill’s lonely cry beckons,
and in the theater of the mind,
shoulder to shoulder with ghostly shadows from the past
they tread the hidden grounds of home
forever and a time
in the wild misty mountains of West Virginia.
©11-9-2001 Maryann Hamm
