My grandmother dreams of houses.
She builds them with paper, water and oil
and hangs them, a gallery on her wall.
She walks through these homes in her sleep
touching the furniture, opening drawers
knowing what will be inside
smelling the smoke of the floorboards and walls —
the smell of a time when coal was burned for fuel
and wood, for cooking and comfort.

Her grandfather was a coal miner
come from the Olde Sodde
could not farm the new
so he crawled beneath it —
land that coughed up soot, blackened his lungs
and turned his hair and early grey
so that his family might call it "home"
so that my grandmother might look
onto a generosity of soil and sky and see
the coming of the wind

and the dust, visitor without welcome.
By 1945 every farm in the county
had been sold and stripped of its coal, leaving more
than footprints behind:
today, there remain long snaking mounds
where dirt was not replaced
and trenches were left to be filled by rain.
Her father did not own the land he farmed
but it was no less hard to leave —
the town became my grandmother's home,
a tidy plot of grass and fence
with little for horizon.

Tonight, my grandmother dreams
of a farm bought back, a house rebuilt.
Brown as paper, it casts its shadow
on land that was never hers
and has yet to be mined.

Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine
Volume 3, Issue 2