Robert Charles Howard - Black Diamonds lyrics

Farmers flocked to Blossburg's mines willing their abandoned plows to perpetual dust and rain. Burrowing into the Tioga hills, with Keagle picks and sledges, they filled their trams with rough cut coal. Black diamonds - carved for waiting boilers of New England mills and trains and Pennsylvania's winter stoves. Brothers, Frank and Asher swung their picks, in tunnels deep beneath the hills and brushed away the clouds of soot. Their coughs at first seemed harmless, as from nagging colds or flus - but deepened as their lungs turned black. Pain and choking drove them to their beds where no medic's art could aid them. Then the coroner came to seal their eyes. A stonecutter's chisel marks their brevity on an marble graveyard obelisk that pays no homage to their sacrifice.