Here's a poem from my mother's chapbook.

Psalm for Appalachia

Janice Miller Potter

Turning shifts for decades, he left a chair by the door

where he tied and untied the broken laces in his boots.

The pencil-marked white table hosts his dinner bucket

whose lid should clank it another dent, whose waxed

paper is balled up for the garbage. But he's left that.

Damp as dug coal, the night has hauled out hard scrabble.

Shirring and bounding, crickets clear weeds and grass.

A moth-eaten beam passes over the room and shatters

the table and the ladderback chair, coal-stained as a lung.

In the skillet, soot marls the sickly white bacon grease

left for a supper of fried eggs which never break.

Nobody is coming back. Nobody is ever coming back.

[from Psalms in Time (Finishing Line Press, 2008)].