Dawn Potter: Company Town

2011

E. B. Leisenring Jr., the scion of a powerful Pennsylvania coal family who led industry negotiators during a long and bitter mine workers’ strike in 1978, ignoring pleas by President Jimmy Carter and helping to win a settlement that largely favored mine owners, died on March 2 at his winter home in Aiken, S.C. He was 85.

—Douglas Martin, The New York Times

Once there was a Leisenring

who was not a man but a word,

three dancing syllables,

etched in white on a rusty green sign,

poised and watchful among the cracked and thwarted hills,

among the whiskey bottles in the quarries,

the spider-webbed fingers of sunlight along the ridge,

the firm red haunches of the heifers,

black kitchen smoke rising from stovepipes,

among rotting tires, among heaps of shattered brick.

Copperheads flickered in the weeds.

—

copyright 2015 Dawn Potter