Poetry

Ron Pretty: Three Poems

Siren for Wendy Richardson   Wendy remembers the miners of the village, how they sat on their front verandas drinking the sun, hawking gobbets of dark phlegm onto hydrangeas or geraniums, those hardy survivors. They were silent men with silent wives, who listened day after day for the siren & waited year after year for black lung or emphysema. Wendy saw them stooped & aching around the village, retired from the pit, struggling for breath.   Once I went down into a mine with Len, who’d worked there boy & man. I saw how the miners bent in the low…

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