Elm Grove, W. Va., 1925

Elm Grove, W. Va., 1925
Whittaker Chambers

Our valley
Is capped with the night sky. Earth’s forsaken alley
Is blocked with the still dark. One light
At the ‘mine-mouth lives through the valley by night.
Only one. The rest is night where our grimed faces
Of the day, washed for sleep, steal sleep from the day each faces. 1 2 3 4

The Miners Are Marching by Hugo Gellert - New Masses - July 1931

Notes:

  1. New Masses – July 1931, Volume 7, No. 2, p. 2
  2. Appears online at Marxist.org: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1931/v07n02-jul-1931-New-Masses.pdf
  3. This incident seems to form part of the ongoing Coal Mine Wars in the Appalachian Mountains that started in Matewan Massacre (1920) and the Battle of Blair Mountain (1921) and continued across the state line in the Harlan County war in Kentucky.
  4. Sergei Eisenstein made a silent, Prolecult movie in 1925 called Strike; Chambers’s first short story in the New Masses was adapted as a Proletcult play.
 

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