Windber Field - Edward Hirsch

[Larry Robinson]

Windber Field

I don’t know why
I thought it was a good idea
to bring Wilfred Owen’s poem
on the colliery disaster of 1918
to that tiny high school class
in western Pennsylvania,
but soon they were writing
about smokeless coal
and black seams
in the ground, the terror
of firedamp, the Rolling Mill
Mine Disaster in Johnstown,
the closing of Windber Field,
the memory of standing
in a wide ring
around a mine shaft
to watch a man emerge
from the earth
like a god, a father
in an open cage
sailing across the sky.

	- Edward Hirsch