Farmers flocked to Blossburg's mines <br /> willing their abandoned plows <br /> to perpetual dust and rain. <br /> <br />Burrowing into the Tioga hills, <br /> with Keagle picks and sledges, <br /> they filled their trams with rough cut coal. <br /> <br />Black diamonds - carved for waiting boilers <br /> of New England mills and trains <br /> and Pennsylvania's winter stoves. <br /> <br />Brothers, Frank and Asher swung their picks, <br /> in tunnels deep beneath the hills <br /> and brushed away the clouds of soot. <br /> <br />Their coughs at first seemed harmless, <br /> as from nagging colds or flus - <br /> but deepened as their lungs turned black. <br /> <br />Pain and choking drove them to their beds <br /> where no medic's art could aid them. <br /> Then the coroner came to seal their eyes. <br /> <br />A stonecutter's chisel marks their brevity <br /> on a marble graveyard obelisk <br /> that pays no homage to their sacrifice.<br /><br />Robert Charles Howard<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/black-diamonds/
