MINER HOME
Travis Byram
Cupboard cubes crowd crumbling earth, children
in their Sunday dress leap off creaking stairs to
look at their new landscape—a dirtdrowned playground.
Their father comes home, coal-black, and with
each hug they suck in puffs of unsuitable soot. Their
mother tells them this is home now. Home—where
files of ruined, dust-drenched shirts and tattered
trousers shuffle to The Mine, five days in a row.
The children toss coal clumps, predicting how many
fragments one seemingly solid rock
can be divided into.
Author's Commentary: For an internship as a poetry writer in my college's Natural History & Archaeology Collections Project, I responded to various late 19th and early 20th century lantern slides, which frequently depicted working class American life. I wrote poems about cotton gins, donkeys carrying orange crates, and two miserable looking children standing next to a shoddy home with enormous mining equipment in the background, via There Will Be Blood. Instead of the equipment, I focused on the kids, what their emotions to this surrounding might be, and structured the poem to resemble a coal lump to show the condensed, monotonous atmosphere they might be living in.
Growing up on the mean streets of Fredericksburg, Virginia (read: modest and antique shop-laden streets), Travis Byram grew up as an only child with a single mother. He is an avid lover of film, a writer, and combines those passions for a movie blog, titoito.blogspot.com, that he runs on the side, which won the 2012 Free Lance-Star Creative Multimedia Contest.
