"SHADOWS IN THE MOUNTAINS"        Have you ever taken a narrow red dog road deep into West Virginia’s hills and hollers.                where once thriving families lived.            A road that ends at silent fields of coal? In their stead now flourishes abundant vegetation, llusive animal life, their burrows and nests concealed in shrubs, trees of dogwood, crab apple and oaks. Rose of Sharon and tiger lilies once tended by a woman's hand, grow feral, resting on cement steps that climb to a void as vapors rise from the ground. We glimpse in eerie shadows a porch and a house that once held laughter and grief and the woman who made it a home. A limestone hillside mottled with soft green moss, seeps and trickles cold clear water. The wellspring filled with tears of love, and of loss shed through generations widowed by the now still mines In the mountain’s mist, the shadow of miners Long gone, amble. The clanking of lunch buckets a rhythmic echo from the past.. At dark, hardhat carbide lanterns light ghostly shadows merge with the flight of the firefly. For sons and daughters who left their mountain roots, a paradox remains within their souls. A pain hidden by the mountain’s beauty drove them to the furthest corners of the earth… They found it matters not A whippoorwill’s lonely cry beckons, and in the theater of the mind, shoulder to shoulder with ghostly shadows from the past hey tread the hidden grounds of home orever and a time in the wild misty mountains of West Virginia.     ©11-9-2001 Maryann Hamm