after Ironwood, Michigan
Sing us a song of how things used to be in a land we once loved. Names of places long ago have become ghost whispers haunting your lips; you just don’t know them yet. Now is the time to sing louder. The living has forgotten how to honor us dead. We women have draped the spider-web gowns of yesterday, once jeweled with the diamonds of our futures, on our shoulders and on our daughters and their daughters. Rags now flap, almost astray, from our bones. The clothesline of our past lives swaying in the wind off Montreal River is made of the crimson that gives blood its bitter backbone. The ground we walked on simmered with dollar signs that soon dusted each new building erected in honor of our new religion. It was only a matter of digging. With the great might of metal claws digging deeper for more, the ore that rose up from the pits tumbled like stone coins into the lorries. The money that swapped hands between afar and here enriched the chosen few men we knew. Weighted with the power to hire and fire, they became names of both respect and derision. The streets of downtown Ironwood have been named after them. Yet no one questions whether we women had lives worth salvaging and remembering. So many of us have been paved into silence and concreted into sidewalks in front of the places we loved to frequent, but we are like trees. No matter how the living may chop down the trunks of our lives and dispose of our sentimental objects, they forget that our roots, the woof and warp, have already woven a tapestry unfurling for miles and miles among the slurries of rust gold. The deposits of story are truly bottomless. We women are the master quilters of time and memory. It is said that there remains an untapped motherlode of ore right underneath the entire area of downtown. Please leave it alone so all of us ghosts — our lives have drifted like dandelion whiskers on the wind into oblivion — can have a place to call our own long after the living have given up on the loneliness of a past no longer theirs. Sing us not a dirge, not a death knell, but a song of joy and hope that will light the way to tomorrow. The very sound is what keeps all of us — both dead and living — alive. Open your mouth so that the very oxygen of death rotting like mushrooms clinging to the roots of trees can rush into your lungs and remind you how you too will be forgotten if you forget to sing of us. We all are your grandmothers and mothers and daughters and granddaughters. We are forever linked, you and us, to the land, once flushed with red gold, that stands resilient against the ravages of time and memory. Seasons are forever dancing in the eternal ballroom of death. Remember us, and we will cherish you when your turn to dance comes.
Made in Michigan is an ongoing curated series of writers born and / or raised in Michigan talking about connections to Michigan. The series is edited by Leah Angstman; inquiries to Lisa Favicchia at editor@thecoilmag.com.
