Alison Armstrong — Writer, Painter

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Alison Armstrong’s involvement with Anglo-Irish literature has resulted in a literary cookbook, The Joyce of Cooking (Station Hill Press, 1986) and a volume of textual scholarship, “The Herne’s Egg”: The Manuscript Materials by W.B. Yeats (Cornell University Press, 1993). Her essays, stories, poetry, and reviews have appeared in various publications, including American Arts Quarterly, BOMB, Exquisite Corpse, Sea Kayaker, Notre Dame Review, PN Review. Recent titles published with Xlibris are Gazelle: Nine Monologues (2018), Pentimenti: Selected Memoirs (2018), Healing Fictions: Assorted Essays on Literature & Art (2019), The Pen-Ultimate Word: Re-Views (2020), and Two Fables (2020).

Bringing the Mules Up into the Light

What could they
imagine,
dragging those
heavy iron cars
along iron rails
along tunnels
so low
they had to keep
their heads
down
lest they scrape
their long ears, tails,
cropped manes or polls
and their rumps
on the rough black
oozing roof
of the mine,
or catch
on the tilted timbers
every so often
holding up the shaft.

Many a long black hair
caught in the splintered edges
of the axe-hewn wood
tarnished with dampness
and coal tar,
and some blood.

Only once in a while,
once every spring,
the beasts would be
unharnessed,
haltered and roped together,
brought up, up to the top of the
shaft like so many Dantes
and turned loose into the light
of lush farm fields
in the Endless Mountains
of Pennsylvania:
the blazing yellow air,
scents of new grass and
songs of birds
uncaged.

Oh, joy! The abandoned
kicking of heels, rolling in grass,
cantering then galloping circles
into the yellow buttercups,
the white smiling daisies
(they had superseded the snowdrops)
the low violets, all
fresh flowers
debase themselves
before the majesty
of delight.
Oh, that
inexpressible
joy, that
uncontrollable
beauty:
those whinnying prayers,
their brief hysterical songs
of gratitude at this
redemption, this
unsought
reward:
this Light.

One can only
shudder
to think:
imagine
(once again)
their return
to that dark world,
those tracks running
still under that Paradise
above their
hanging
heads,
somewhere
near Scranton.

Based on a story told to me in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The coal miners’ mules, brought out to pasture in the spring, would run wild, crazed with the light and freedom, what should have been their birthright on the farms—and then were taken back down into the coal mines to work another ten to eleven months.

Artwork by Alison Armstrong