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Pine Row Issue No. 11 Autumn 2025 - Featured Poet
My Grandfather Dug Coal
To be your granddaughter is to know
earth’s darkness,
different than night,
the kind where you dream
seams of garnet left by stars.
Not just a combustible hunk
of cold, not just one way out,
and a ceiling of shale
ready to choke-damp the tunnel
between you and your seven kids.
Because of you, the sky opens
into lapis, sun showers the gliding chair
where I sit and watch beetles
clamber from small shafts,
the voles soft ramble toward
an exit I can never seem to find.
To be your granddaughter,
Is to know the mountain that’s been
torn, plowed, blasted.
You didn’t know you’d die at thirty-three,
you just kept
swinging that big lamp
toward the outbye at quitting time,
burrowing up towards light.
About the poem: as shared by the poet Sharon Perkins Ackerman
About the poem: as shared by the poet Sharon Perkins Ackerman
From the desk of the poet:
My grandfather died around 1935 after a coal mining incident. “It tore a hole in his heart,” says the oral history. I’ve felt a need to bring him up into the light somehow, and perhaps writing does that.
This poem recently appeared in an anthology of poems called Book of Jobs by Erin Murphy, Penn State.
Sharon Perkins Ackerman holds an M.Ed from the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Places, Still: The Journal, Meridian, Blue Mountain Review, Kestrel, and various others. She is the winner of the Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine international poetry contest, London 2019. Her second poetey collection A Legacy of Birds will be published in 2025 (Kelsay Books). Her manuscript Sweeping the Porch will be published by Pine Row Press in early 2026.
More here.
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