Tryst Press | Broadsides

Here is the first publication of a moving poem of remembrance written by Leslie Norris. It is his response to an invitation to take part in a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of a great mining disaster, which took place in Winter Quarters, Scofield, Utah. Norris later wrote of the terrible accident: "The explosion was the most catastrophic industrial disaster in the United States until the nineteen-thirties, and resulted in the enacting of a whole series of safety regulations concerning the working of mines being adopted throughout the industry, in America and Europe. It was not a local event." Families from Wales, England, Scotland, Cornwall, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Poland, France, Iceland, and Finland were in a day robbed of husbands, brothers, and fathers.

Norris's requiem is both a personal and a shared grief. He recalls how his own father, a miner in Wales, suffered great injury in the dark pit, and mourns the loss of his father's young assistant, George. He pays homage to "the men and boys / Whose lives were taken wherever coal is cut, / Who went too early to the earth they worked in."

Beautifully ornamented by Robert Buchert with a woodcut fashioned to appear as fossils in coal, this reverent, handset broadside is a stunning connection to the past. (Scroll down to read text.)

Letterpress. Edition of 35.
8.75 x 17.125 inches.
SOLD OUT.

Elegy
for the Men Killed at Winter Quarters,

Scofield, Utah, 1 May 1900
by Leslie Norris

Before I was fiive years old I watched three men
Bring my father home from the mine.
One carried him pick-a-back.
They brought him through the kitchen
And laid him soft as women could
On the bed made hurriedly in the back room.
They were in their pit dirt, lips and tongues
Scarlet in the black dust of their faces.
One of them, the biggest, said to my mother,
"I'm sorry, love, I'm afraid his back is broken."
Speaking in Welsh, which was our language then.

I make this poem for the men who sat at ease
In the safety of their evening homes; who labored
In darkness, and died in the shattered earth.

George Williams was my father's boy,
His helper. He would hand my dad his pick.
When enough coal was cut, he'd slide
On his shoulders to the narrow seam, scrape
The bright coal into the wide scoop
The boys used, and lift it, lump by lump,
To the waiting tram. He was fourteen.
I did not know him. I like to think of him
At my father's side. "Tell me about George Williams,"
I used to ask. When I knew he was dead
Beneath the stone that crippled my father,
I would not be comforted. Many years ago.

I make this poem for the men and boys
Whose lives were taken wherever coal is cut,
Who went too early to the earth they worked in.

I have brought with me to Winter Quarters
Echoes of the voices of mourning women,
And the silence of the men of Gresford, in North Wales,
Where two hundred and forty lie in darkness,
And of the many dead in Senghenydd, killed
In one morning. Let the men from Finland,
The Welsh, the Scots, Englishmen, Frenchmen,
Dying far from their countries a hundred years ago,
Let them be united in the rough brotherhood
Of all tragic mines. Let the winds blow kindly
Above them and their graves be peaceful.

I make this poem for the men who died
When darkness exploded, and for their families,
And for those of us who come after them.