Doubly Precious
by Judith Vollmer

When the first wave of family members and mourners visited the site, many of them spoke of how beautiful and peaceful the fields are. Having come from large cities (Boston, New York, Los Angeles), they didn't realize that the "fields" are coal-stripped land coming through reclamation. Around here, the land and the site perhaps are doubly precious, bittersweet, and "marked": land that is replanted with grasses over the ruined/mined place, now marked by the ashes of the plane and its dead.

Judith Vollmer is a poet and professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.