MIT Poetry

A Child's Chore

Samuel Jay Keyser

William Barton Rogers, the first president of MIT, died while delivering the
President's Address in 1881. His last words as he lay on the commencement
platform were "bituminous coal."

Each winter month the coal truck
dumped behind our house
like some rough beast
its burden on the ground.

Coal-scuttle and lamp in hand,
I followed snowy prints I'd made the night before
to where the coal man binned the coal.
It was a witch's den.

My eyes made rats of shadow shapes,
my ears, snakes of the wind.
Cursing aloud, I wielded the shovel,
filled the scuttle to its fat, protruding lip

and dragged it to the kitchen.
I crammed the maw of the Arcola stove,
watching as it gobbled coals
like Dante's Satan gobbled souls.

I banked the fire and went to bed.
In the morning I turned a crank dislodging
last night's ashes and lugged the grimy ash box
back along the trampled path for burial.

The bottomless Arcola is long since gone,
melted in an ironmonger's
bigger stove, turned to nails,
or someone's gate.

Its memory has grown cold as well.
Yet when I die, "anthracite"
will be on my lips,
hard, clean, dustless.

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