Journal of an Occasional Poet

This particular poem came about when for some bleak, yet important, reason I found myself thinking about mines and mining one day, when I was struck for the first time by the double-meaning of the word mine—both as the concept of ownership, as well as the extraction of minerals and other things from the earth. Suddenly mining became a brand-new verb in my eyes—the action of taking something that is not owned and “mining” it. Transforming it into a possession. Making it mine.

This musing left me with what I recognized right away as the last line of a poem, despite my rarely writing poetry. I graduated from SNHU’s Mountainview MFA Program in Nonfiction this past June, and spent those two years writing a collection of interwoven essays, both personal and ecological, and this was the only poem I wrote during my time there. Unlike much of what I work on, which requires a fair amount of context or unpacking, this idea felt like it needed to be conveyed quickly and efficiently—build an image that everyone is already familiar with, a mine, then make them consider the double meaning of the word with one simple, concluding line.

Here’s the poem:

Mine

Earth turned inside out

Disappeared

Turned to crater, to air

To caverns, to cavity

To spoils

Earth turned to money

An unholy alchemy

The yellow trucks, obedient soldiers

Driving in and out

into the maw

Day and night

of that silent scream

Removing the excess dirt

All that in-our-way earth

To find what’s below, what’s within

these burial grounds of fabulous creatures

Their gorgeous earth bodies plundered—

copper arteries, cobalt jawbone

ruby knuckles, sapphire scales

radioactive cake of fossilized digestive tract

a grin of diamonds

chipped and scattered

across blizzard of time

The dead workers

pulled like clods of fabric

from the collapsed shaft

were also made of stardust

Only in a world with the word

“mine” in it

could any of this

be possible

On a different day, I might have gone down that same train of thought with my essayist’s hat on and began researching the history of mining, comparing the different cosmologies that would allow a Euro-colonial-capitalist worldview to act in ways so perverse and abhorrent to most Indigenous cultures. I may have found examples of particularly destructive mining operations, or deadly mining accidents, and I would have been off to the races, writing a 6,000-word essay.

These are all subjects deserving deep exploration, but I’m glad I chose to write a poem that day, because one of the great gifts of poetry is to convey much using few words (a challenge for a writer like myself who was accused of maximalism in more than one peer review workshop while at SNHU), while trusting your readers to find their own way to meaning using their hearts rather than their heads—a place where an idea is more likely to catch, and germinate. Thank you for reading.

Sam Keck Scott is a freelance writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in Outside, Orion, Terrain.org, Camas, Harpur Palate, The New Guard Literary Review, and is forthcoming from Hakai. Sam has also been an author and photographer for the National Geographic Society, a Writing By Writers Fellow, the co-author of the children’s book, Sip the Straw, and the winner of the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction. In addition to writing, Sam is a wildlife biologist, a conservationist, and an avid adventurer. When not living out of his truck or a hotel room for work—or exploring some far-flung land or sea—he calls Northern California home. Sam earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he was awarded the Lynn Safford Memorial Prize for best nonfiction thesis.