Christine Orchanian Adler: Mine

The year my dad’s back

gave out, Doc Hadden read the tests

and sighed, “black lung” while mother

stood apron clad with hanky-pressed mouth,

dry eyed. Some months later came

her call, a blinking light left, found

upon my tired return from

a medical research cram.

I pulled the indexed notes, stacked

so neatly in my bag and sat,

listened to her words and flipped

through detail-crowded cards,

each a meticulous list

of disease and lethal symptoms.

I’d read their names, drop my eyes

test myself: Scrofula: tubercular

infection; impacts throat lymph glands.

At twenty, he’d followed his father

into the seams, ceilings dripping water. He’d lie

in mud, supine, nineteen working inches

lit only by his miner’s lamp.

Yaws: chronic, relapsing infectious

illness; spirochete caused; cannot penetrate

skin. Influenza: virus; changes by mutation.

The day he told me the story of Macbeth,

the mine that blew a dark March day

and took his father’s life, I knew the chain

would break. Pneumoconiosis: also known

as black lung disease; two forms—

simple and progressive massive fibrosis.

Miners who’d once gone below

in dark of early morning trudged

over those same entries bearing

stretchers, mangled corpses of family men.

He’d rushed the vast black cavity of Macbeth

Mine that day, stood among the town waiting.

They’d remain long, dark days, edge

the mine’s mouth while rain poured down,

a town of immobile kin. The mournful

cable whine brought them to the surface

body after body

but the screams of widows rising

at each man’s recognition haunt

my father still. “It’s all we knew.”

He shrugged his burly shoulders, pointed

his eyes downward when I made

medical school my goal

instead of coal. “It’s over,”

her voice fell flatly in the room.

Cards fluttered to the floor

while I sat, eyes down understanding

that the only life I’d saved

by breaking the chain was mine.

This poem has appeared in Coal: A Poetry Anthology, and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.