Pit

  Coal mining has a long and storied history in Kentucky and the rest of Appalachia.  Many of the stories speak of horrible working conditions and noble miners struggling to feed their families while being oppressed by the companies that owned the very hovels they lived in.  Songs of long days in deep dark holes and the men who died in them are common place among the singers who came out of such places.  It is a dark but essential past that formed the foundations of much Appalachian culture, bringing entire communities of immigrants to mining towns only to see their communities whither when the companies left.  Pit encompasses this feeling of descent into the mine and into despair.

For me, the best part of this piece is that because the glass wasn’t compatible with itself, it is continuing to crack and disintegrate.  It’s a dying object, doomed to catastrophe.