“Song of the Mountains” and “For Just a Handful of Coal” by John C. Mannone

Song of the Mountains

Folk music—Appalachia’s heartbeat, celebrates the sacred: family, land
Soothes the spirit: wind chimes through the holler, the breath of children
Mountains shake, trees quake, sky whispers lament, streams burdened
with stripped coaldust

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—A variation of the Korean form called a sijo (Sejong Cultural Society)

For Just a Handful of Coal

Tritina

Strip mining decapitates the mountains
Their remains are dumped into rivers
Many tears have been shed by the sky

Appalachia raised prayers to beyond the sky
And asked the Creator of green mountains,
And of all the land and overburdened rivers

To intervene soon before their hope rivers
Away. No one can hold more tears, the sky
Too. Let peace return to our beloved mountains

Mountains, Rivers, Sky all joining hands with us.

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The tritina, originally credited to Marie Ponsot (and colleagues) at the end of the 20th century, is
like the baby sister of the sestina, where the end words are cyclically permuted and completed with
a single-line envoi.

John C. Mannone has poems in Anthology of Appalachian Writers XV and XVI,
Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, and Baltimore Review.
He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and
served as the celebrity judge for the $1000 prize for the National Federation of
State Poetry Societies (2018). His newest collections are Song of the Mountains
(Middle Creek Publishing, 2023; nominated for the Weatherford Award) and
Sacred Flute (Iris Press 2024). He’s a physicist teaching mathematics and creative
writing in an east Tennessee magnet high school.

Click on the following images to find John C. Mannone’s poetry collections:

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**Featured image credit: Blue Ridge Mountains by Clark Wilson on Unsplash