Hallowed Ground, A Poem by Phil Woods

Evergreen Cemetery Leadville: mounds on the ground are unmarked graves of between 1500 and 2000 people buried in the 1880s, 1890s. In some places evergreen trees are growing atop the largely uncared-for graves. It is estimated that three quarters of these are of Irish miners who worked the area’s silver mines, average age 23 years.

HALLOWED GROUND

Stare at sunken Irish graves unmarked in Leadville’s Evergreen Commentary.

The bagpipe has stopped playing.The folk singer has ended her warm up song.

The stories are so moving,colorful, funny & tragic of equal measure.

I recall being at the Little Big Horn.

We like to call battlefields—hallowed ground.

At one time Leadville was forty thousand —eighty percent Irish. Mostly lead & silver miners making three dollars a day at ten thousand feet.

Too broke to put up a tombstone. Dying like flies in their twenties. Dying as infants, mothers in childbirth.

My friend Jim Walsh, says they would come out of the heat of the mines in winter & have their sweat soaked clothes freeze right to their skin like being armored in ice. Pneumonia,

TB, influenza, no wonder these survivors of the famine, maybe two thousand died & now lie in sunken, forgotten graves in a high alpine meadow with old pine growing in amongst their spent bones.

Yes, hallowed ground, not of military battle, but fierce class war.

Once again saying the history of America can never be told by Disney.

The strike leader—Michael Mooney—had the audacity to say he & his owned a corner of our flag because they sweated & bleed for it.

That is why it is a sacred place to begin to understand the heart breaking truth about this land of promise & betrayal.

__________

photos by Rob Prince

former Denver City Auditor, Dennis Gallagher addressing an audience at Everygreen Cemetery in Leadville, Colorado, where, on October 3, 2016, those present held a wake for those 1500 to 2000 buried in unmarked graves, some three-fourths of them estimated to have been Irish miners, average age 23. Gallagher’s remarks were genuinely touching.