6
PARTISAN REVIEU"
But it is useless, Andy.
The coal dust lies too far inside, it will
lie forever, like a hand squeezing your heart, choking at your throat.
The bowels of earth have claimed you.
Breathe and breathe.
How fresh the night.
But the air you
will know will only be sour with sweat, and this strong wind on
your body turn to the clammy hands of sweat tickling under your
underwear.
Breathe and breathe, Andy, turn your eyes to the stars.
Their
beauty, never known before, pricks like tears. You belong to a star-
less night now, unimaginably black, without light, like death.
Per-
haps the sweat glistening on the roof rock seen for an instant will
seem like stars.
And no more the sweet rain, Andy, child now of the earth's
bowels.
Soggy water slushing underfoot, water dripping through
a niggerhead, these are yours.
No more, Andy, rain for you, or
wind, or stars, or clean air.
And no more can you stand erect. You lose that heritage of man
too.
You are brought now to fit earth's intestines, stoop like a
hunchback underneath,
crawl like a child, do your man's work
lying on your side, stret.:hed and tense as a corpse.
The rats shall be your birds, and the rocks plopping in the water,
your music. And death shall be your wife, who woos you in the
brief moments when coal leaps from a bursting side, when a cross-
piece falls and barely misses your head, when you barely catch the
ladder to bring you up out of the hole you are dynamiting.
Breathe and lift your face to the night, Andy Kvaternick.
Trying
so vainly in some inarticulate way to purge your bosom of the coal
dust. Your father had dreams. You too, like all boys, had dreams,
vague dreams of freedom and light and cheering throngs, and
happiness. The earth will take these too. You will leave them in, to
replace the coal, to bear up the roof instead of the pillar the super
ordered you to rob. Earth sucks you in, to spew out the coal, to
make a few fat bellies fatter.
Earth takes your dreams, that a few
may languidly lie on couches and trill,
"How exquisite," to paid
dreamers.
Someday, the bowels will grow monstrous and swollen with these
old tired dreams, swell and break, and strong fists batter the fat
bellies, and skeletons of starved children batter the fat bellies, and
perhaps you will be slugged by a thug hired by the fat bellies, Andy
Kvaternick,or
perhaps death will take you to bed, or you will
strangle with the old crony of miners, the asthma.
