Old Photo: The Union Buries … (오래된 사진: 조합원이 땅에 묻는 …)

By | 22 May 2011

A solid pack around his grave.
Good steel to a magnet, the sky leaden
with the warmth, somehow, of common ground.

I did not know them all
but the bulk of them knew me. Their leader
told them of his bookish son

and of his grand children gathered, see—
near my elbow on the lava plain
on the hard crust of the Flats

near thistles, stone walls, Carbon Black
and the cracker’s flame leaping
where the cranes once flew

over a lad’s lizard-hunting days.
That was the time of solid stories,
of organizing rather than mourning.

This group, with family in it, is resolution.
I remember stupidly thinking, ‘the clay’s so
sticky no union man could turn in it.’

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