In eastern Kentucky
there's a three-street town with a store,
a string of empty L & N coal cars
by the mouth of a mine,
a patch of field beside a slow-moving river,
a horse-drawn plow,
a man walking away,
the horse cannot,
the clanging rattle and din of the mine
makes the nervous horse head
jerk and turn,
the huge machines cutting, shooting out the coal
that fills the gondolas,
that roll by the field,
the town, across the river,
over the mountains
to the great apparatus that make the tension wires
all over the country go hmnn, hmnn.
Meanwhile the man has reached the
little town,
the grocery store where he is told his credit is
no good and a woman he touches lightly
shushes a baby on its porch.
Oh goodbye to the horse and man, the
store, the town,
the woman and baby
and the bluish sheen on the scrubby grass
just beginning to appear.
—John McBride
