Sherry Chandler

2 Comments

• 1. Rosalie replies at 31st January 2007, 5:09 pm :

  Sherry,
  the McKibbon quote reminded me of Susan Sontag’s book, Illness As Metaphor, in which she asserts that to associate illness with personal psychological traits leads to a distorted public perspective of illness. I think something similar can be said for the language we choose to discuss the “landscape” left in the wake of mountaintop removal –or any strip-mining operation, or of deforestation, for that matter. I can sense Mr. McKibbon’s frustration with not being able to find the words to describe such an indescribable horror, but sometimes, similes and metaphors are just not appropriate.

  I have not seen, first hand, the destruction in the Appalachians, only pictures, but I come from Arizona, and I have seen how Phelps Dodge strip-mines the mountains and deserts for copper ore. As recently as two years ago, while visiting Arizona, I stopped to see the copper mine in Ray, and I still can’t talk about what I saw and felt there in a way which would allow someone to even come close to understanding the enormity of this transgression.

  Some months later, still compelled to try to express what I had witnessed at the Ray mine, I wrote a poem about my experience there. It still doesn’t say it all, but writing it did help me begin to see and accept my part in the healing of the earth. I can still close my eyes and see…I can hear the trucks… “like thousands of wings growling”…

  I’m thankful there are people like Bill McKibbon and the others (I’m thinking of that wonderful anthology) who have written about Appalachian mountaintop removal. Perhaps the best they, we, as writers, can do is to make people want to look at what’s happening, to see the truth for themselves.

  Here’s my poem, “At Ray Mine”.

  This is where I belong. Here, where
  the mountains are inside out
  upside down, it is beyond
  evisceration. Mother, sliced
  carved and layered, each ore load
  dug and trucked from her belly
  (like thousands of beating wings
  like thousands of wings growling)
  from the pit, the core of her.

  Her blood is stolen. Poison
  rivers lonely through her veins.

  And still the brittle brush blooms
  along the highways. Hillsides
  complete in rock and yellow
  under clouds stretched by the wind.
  Thunderclouds in the southeast,
  stones standing like Apache
  warriors, like Chiricahuas,
  distant silent sentinels
  the mountains rise up, hover.

  It becomes harder to breathe.
  It becomes impossible.

  We make our living digging
  our graves, greeding our way through
  that which is not ours to take,
  that from which our talismans
  cannot protect us. Down here
  in the haunt of desire,
  deep in her belly churning,
  there is no place to stand.
  There is no time for mourning.

  We beg her to forgive us
  before she spits us out.

  (c) 2005 Rosalie O’Leary

• 2. sherry replies at 31st January 2007, 5:40 pm :

  “We make our living digging
  our graves, greeding our way through
  that which is not ours to take,
  that from which our talismans
  cannot protect us. ”

  Wow! Rosalie. This is a powerful poem.

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