Ok, I’m clearly not managing a poem a day, and what I’m writing about is Ina. So I’ll just keep these coming as fast as I can, hoping the whole story will find itself told before my 2nd packet deadline.

First Night

It was late when she came up.
Last night she would have said dark
but Ina would never again
confuse night with dark.

Heading down the hill she realized
that going home would give her away.
The coal dust that protected her secret in the mine
would betray the second she set foot in her house.
So she grunted and stuck her hand to the right,
parting from the men on the path.

The woods had been her shelter many times before,
the roots of a tree upended as good a wind shelter
as the shack her family’d had since her father’s death.

When she’d return tomorrow as grimy as she’d left
no one would give a rat’s ass. Miners knew everything
there was to know about making do and they’d all been
a scrawny boy without a second set of clothes.