Journal of Writing & Environment

Eclogue on Train Trestle

Poetry by Rachel Morgan

Poem 2 of 2

Bio
Notes
More

Originally from Tennessee, Rachel Morgan now lives, teaches, and writes in Iowa. She is co-editor of Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press). Her work recently appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, Mid-American Review, DIAGRAM, Barrow Street, and Hunger Mountain. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently she teaches at the University of Northern Iowa and is the Poetry Editor for the North American Review.

I come from a long line of coal miners and tobacco farmers in a rural region of the Appalachian Mountains. Without many educational and economic opportunities, families in this region had little means of support outside these occupations. In fact, one of my father’s earliest memories is sitting on his father’s lap as my grandfather operated a dragline at a strip mine. Today old tipples, coal cars, and train trestles rust around abandoned mines, and seeing this giant, silent equipment is a haunting reminder of what we’ve taken from the environment. It’s worth noting that new cornfields abut mines and decaying tobacco barns.

Water seeps through rock

winter rattlesnake slow.

Icicles beard the cliff base.

Before ascent the mountain

is also a valley.

Weight and water

travel against resistance

but each timber bent

is bobby pin delicate.

At the end of a tipple

a burn like icing water

empties one bed to warm another.