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Home  »  The New Poetry  »  The Miner

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Miner

By Maxwell Bodenheim

THOSE on the top say they know you, Earth—they are liars.

You are my father, and the silence I work in is my mother.

Only the son knows his father.

We are alike—sweaty, inarticulate of soul, bending under thick knowledge.

I drink and shout with my brothers when above you—

Like most children we soon forget the parents of our souls.

But you avidly grip us again—we pay for the little noise of life we steal.