NO OLVIDEMOS QUEA Poem by kublakhan27 See notes for description.
2011
A reader's appetite for parables and metaphors and morals are diffused on occasion by a poet's image sandwiches, not for digestion by imagination, but for a sampler's scaling back of layers to reveal slices of a theme or condimental motifs. No potential page's poetry was to be found around my stoic grandfather's seven-year Lay-Z-Boy'ed post-retirement domain. But surely there was wary history and fiction wheezing in a huddled heap between the ocean floor and what I prayed was not a ceiling. That was where he inhaled dust sandwiches and rolled the aftertaste into filterless tobacco - a tinted white reward to look forward to should Company-unfettered fate grant him another mortal drive home - before a stained wristwatch spirited him back to an industry's wall-paring quest for vegetative infinity; under water in its purest context, and suppressing through steel toes what I prayed was not a ceiling. No benevolence has ever burrowed feyly into underground mythology and returned unimpaired. Was the fire-cored cunning of an imprisoned faction palpable enough to stage an earthen-brown uprising in a firedamp game of chicken with canaries, followed up by hide-and-seek with buried lungs? My grandfather was no poet, but a artist nonetheless, seasoned by municipal default in an industry's equivalent of what a young reader might dub the Dark Arts. Flirtation with damnation to emerge and punch a grimy clock converting currency in shiny black shards necessary for the payment of the toll before his Eastern family's Northern absolution. 2001 "There are two kinds of people: railroaders and those who'd like to be." - Steve Rankin, Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) President, June 1983 It was there like a church in "The Garden Of Love:" the orphaned root of an epoch, disrupting progress and challenging evolution. It was there with its rusted veins of steel, slithering their way to the limits of the now-famished town they once helped to feed, where Company-constructed Homes are piled up before the shoreline abruptly yet symmetrical. When it functioned, the railroad track crossed the back road and tightened, looking poised to run ramrod straight through the roadside ocean, oblivious to incoming trains and their wide-open hungry chick mouths awaiting coal for the Wash Plant and its suitors: the Power Plants, retail yards, and domestic furnaces. But there was an end before the shore, shaded by field and cliff; an end for the track but a continuum measured metaphorically by men and boys who took it deep beneath the water, re-emerging in the guise of the ancient vegetation they unearthed, sporting pitch-hued calluses evocative of roof leaks: sombre sea drops burrowing their way into flesh in want of shelter from the dark, dank underworld they had fallen into. My grandfather must have been hounded by similar instincts on the drive that grazed the reverent town's shoreline, for when he retired - many years after the explosion robbed the track essentially of use and parentage - The Miner seldom rose from his own disposition as it did from the underground shafts before. Only his commemorative retirement clock and portrait acknowledging twenty-five years of Company service ratted him out. The only yarns ever unravelled were those for his crochets. Stories and nostalgia were offered up only when asked for. Nostalgia may have rattled off the tracks in subtle aftershocks when crossed in the days that followed the explosion. But days accumulated, giving way to months and years and their smouldering effect on the fire of all poignant memories, even on our most poignant memories of the fire. I wonder if nostalgia was on the minds of the Corporation's final class: those entrusted with the task of tearing up the crippled steel rails from their wooden roots, leaving in the roads a generic bump like any other you might huff and puff about on a drive through the asphalt patchwork that passes for our rural roads. Progress is on the way, the Post tells us every few years, but neglects to tell us how it will arrive now that it can no longer take the train, nor can it access the Company Houses that flirt with an eroding cliff on the shoreline, once a network of communal solidarity and now a cradle of awkward omnipresence. Their symmetry endures like cemetery plots, for this is a graveyard too, and the shore a port of loss. It is hard to say what my grandfather would think of this new history. Like the mine out here and its sister mines nearby, he has gone under; time and circumstance leaving him numb to progress, save the progress of de-evolution. © 2012 kublakhan27Author's Note
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kublakhan27Nova Scotia, CanadaAboutMy first book is out! Any comments that anyone may have to offer regarding my work would be deeply appreciated, as I'm yet to get a review. www.amazon.com/Waltz-Around-Swirls-Steven-Fortune/dp.. more..Writing
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