Buried deep in the coal mines and occurring in abundance are boulders ranging from the size of a baseball to such huge proportions as to weigh many tons. Each of these is composed of a pyrite-like substance so hard that in order to remove the larger ones from the miner's path, diamond tipped drills are required. Sometimes it takes months of painfull labor to drill and blast through but one.
The conventional theory of the formation of these boulders concerns each arising from a single grain of sand, which rolled and gathered to itself the mass of the materials, which were to lie baking into hardness in the slowly forming coal beds.
Through years of coal mining, however, I have come to believe in a different theory based on first-hand observation of the boulders and their places of occurrence. It is my firm belief that during the Carboniferous Period of our Earth's development, that age in which coal was formed, a gigantic upheaval took place in the universe as well as on Earth. Meteors and shooting stars zoomed through the heavens, and many collided with the Earth to sink into the deep bogs of coal vegetation.These prodigal stars are the boulders we miners discover hidden in the black strata of the coal beds.
I feel it is necessary to present this theory here in order to aid the reader in better understanding some of these poems. Surely it is possible and logical that God did "fling us a handful of stars!" *
THE AUTHOR
*From Louis Untermeyer-----“Caliban in the Coal Mines."
