From the Heart of the San Juan Range

Hillside Cemetery - Silverton, Colorado

Mining Sky in Silverton

James Hart 

for Denise, Millie, and Barbara, and our grandmothers
touched by the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918

Here on this mountainside in Silverton
we ascend into our grandmothers’ graves,
a pilgrimage we make under summer sun.
The road hangs between the sky and river

rolling rhapsodies of silver light below us,
something about this narrow cliffside trail
where mostly sunlight goes and wind follows
reminiscent of snowbound miners, their pails

of silver hauling up time by tarnished tons.
Again, we remember their elegiac stories
of influenza and abandonment to our sons,
how pandemic was the silver rush, its allures

filling eyes of these dead men buried here.
I think of other gravesides from too long ago,
the irony of miners mining silver here, tears
in their pockets, unnumbered tons below.


(Poem from an unpublished manuscript
entitled Somewhere West of Never)