Mountaintop Removal

responsible for the fall issue. It is very heartening to me to know that Appalachian Heritage will live on. Winter days are now upon us, and we must each in our own way experience what life has in store for us. I would not want to live if I did not have the spring season to anticipate. But even in the dead of winter I can find promises of springtime on the horizon. I am looking forward to having personal time for my own writing, lecturing, and teaching, and looking forward to springtime again when the first faint tracings of green appear on bushes and trees. Then in such a short time the season turns to seeds in the ground, growing things, and new promises. Mountaintop Removal ? II III Beyond green ridges gray ones, blue; the starched sky fits snugly defining sunlight, black smoke. Reaching for sky hope, for tonnage, coal trucks kiss front-end loaders, in a tabernacle of dieseled incense. Bulldozers bury the ancient womb, reconstituting, reclaiming mountains, renaming greenness even sky. Behind Caudill's store crumpled asphalt lies like spent rubber spun by swollen tires in search of treasure beneath thick slate. Green ridges, blue fall pliant to bulldozer blades and yield, groaning, their firstborn, stratified tales. Beneath ridge tops trucks swell with coal descend and wind past oaks and pines houses, gardens, indifferent. Black ribbon climbs through greenness inexorably past cabins, trailers, limestone creek beds, a thousand stories. Beyond the trees, what rose descends: ridge tops, coal, trees, over-burden, trucks, storiesexcept black clouds. Behind the trees, Caudill's store, crumbling asphalt finds its way beyond mountains, leaving only smoke. - Steve Rhodes ...