April 21, 2010

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  The Quarry Ghosts

   

  It's difficult to trace out where the blockhouse stood

  Although if you look carefully and slice the brush

  The granite base cleared now of strangled berry-wood

  Is visible beyond the wash

   

  Once long ago - this place resounded with delighted cries

  Of children scampering across the quay

  As steamer-cranes lifted huge cuts beyond the rise

  Onto the barkantines that lay at lee

   

  Among weed-woven tangles of this ditch

  You find old lamps and pots and Leslie Magazines

  A shredded doll - A tallow cup stuffed in a niche

  A book of verse marked Josephine's

   

  The names and dates are also chiseled there to read

  The Abels Joshuas Mollys and the rest

  These drillers cutters blasters and their broods

  Whisper across the hundred summers that have passed

   

   

   

   

  Note:

  The granite quarried on Friendship Long Island in Muscongus Bay Maine, was used

  to build Grant’s Tomb in Riverside Park in New York City… Sometime later, the workers

  struck for a five-cent hourly raise and the Boston owners shut the quarry down

  rather than give in to them… They decided to work the granite themselves

  and hired an overzealous young blaster who promptly blew a hole through to the sea

  and the pumps could not contain the flooding so the quarry was abandoned…

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  • 2:04 pm
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