- So I'm going to read the ghost of Ludlow that
started this journey.
And actually, it was one of the places
that I knew I had to see.
As artists, we give ourselves permission
to write about places we don't know, right?
That's part of the advantage of the imagination.
But somehow I felt that I needed to go to Ludlow Colorado
to see this ghost town, which is what it was.
And there was actually there's a monument there.
And one of the underground cellars, which
is where the people perished.
Maybe not that cellar, but cellars like that.
Because they were living underground because they
had been cast out of their shacks by the mine owner.
And so that's where they built their own makeshift housing
with the blankets.
And so to protect themselves from the elements,
they built these cellars.
And that's where they were.
So when the folks that came to light everything
on fire, all the people that were cut underground,
they suffocated there.
So there's one cellar.
And I went there.
I hired a research assistant a young woman
who drove me out there.
I flew into Pueblo, Colorado, and was about an hour away.
And we drove down there.
And then now came the challenges that, well, I can't really
write until I'm actually in that cellar.
I said, but do you want to go down there together?
I said, it feels like well, OK.
Let's do it.
So we open up this cellar, this door.
And we climb down.
And it was so claustrophobic and tiny.
And the whole time I'm thinking about the tragedy
that happened there.
And let me tell you.
We lasted 30 seconds because there
was something about that space.
And not just the cellar, but the entire ghost town.
The tragedy was still there.
And which is why I began to think about the way
that the land is absorbing all the damage that we do
and all our crimes that we commit.
There in the land.
Not just in the history books, not just in memory.
There in the land.
And the way the land is like is going to fight back.
It's already fighting back.
So 30 seconds later, we just bolted out of there.
And plus I was afraid, what if that cellar door closes.
We're going to be stuck in here, right?
So well, let's not.
And she took all these photographs really quickly.
She took all these photographs.
And then she mailed them to me.
And they were so blurry.
And I said to her, we know they're useless.
But why are they so blurry?
She said, my hand was trembling.
I was just so scared.
So this is The Ghost of Ludlow.
A century of silence is violence.
That winter a blizzard a cold that crawled
at the summit of the crystal mountains
and covered the foothills with a crust of ice.
Everything widened into bone.
That clothesline snapped like a branch.
A warning shot can be understood in any language.
The entrance to the coal mine dropped
open like the mouth of the skull without eyelids.
Mining folk felt safest underground.
The pits were for protection from the chill
that has stretched into spring.
The pit for protection from the wind
that kept the walls of each tent shivering all night.
The pits were for protection.
And somehow, the kettle still sang.
Its burst of steam a prize distraction
inside the deadness of the tent.
In the moment, it was the thing with most life.
It filled the small space with breath and exhale so far away.
From the hour, it would take the first bullet and its lung.
The horses crushed the quiet.
Their nostrils flared.
And suddenly, they looked quite human in their rage.
One foot sunk its hoof into the face of a doll.
An act so cruel, it had to have been deliberate.
The baby limbs stretched out in shock.
No mouth, no throat, no sound.
The horse shook its tail like a shrug.
Few things gathered the bodies in the camp.
The game of baseball, a marriage of questioning,
a strike, and a war, which darkened
the light in the tents, shadow upon shadow.
The soldiers first, then the smoke.
And then the fall of smothering sky.
The pits so womb like.
A refuge for the lambs while the wolf devoured the tents.
The sheep like--
So sheep like in their whiteness.
So sheep like in their bleeding.
The pits were for protection.
One evening, the cook was making stew in the caldron.
A witch's brew said the children who
dared themselves to come near enough to toss a pebble of coal
in the pot.
The rocks bounced off the bellies
of both caldron and cook.
The man cursed, which only made the children giggle.
He chased them off with a spoon, and made them laugh some more.
To teach a lesson.
He grabbed the rabbit by the ears.
It kicked, and splashed as he submerged it
under boiling water.
He trapped it with the lid.
The children screamed in terror imagining the bunny swimming
to the scalding soup only to reach scalding metal.
Grief for a dead child sounds the same
in Greek, or Italian, or Spanish.
Grief for 11 children has no language.
Only numbness.
It hardens even the land.
Fires dissipated.
Battles ended.
The miners rolled their stories up
and left the town of Ludlow 100 years empty
except for in an abandoned row of shacks.
Near the baseball diamond, a memorial as
neglected as the playing field.
A memorial rings hollow.
It's for the solace of the living.
To reach the dead.
Walk toward the structures still standing.
Their windows still looking in.
Listen closely for the ghost of a woman
tucking into bed the ghost of her son.
Lean in.
That blunt sound you hear:
The weight of a ghost of a kiss as it passes through his head.
The collapse of absence into absence.