Ludlow

Poetry Book 2008
By David Mason

One of the most shameful horrors of the long battle for union organizing rights occurred near tiny Ludlow, Colorado. Coal miners struck, and were kicked out of their company-owned homes. They settled in an ad hoc tent community and held out well until April 1914, when Colorado National Guards got nasty. Eighteen tenters were killed, most of them children suffocated in fires set by rampaging guardsmen. Mason fills out the historical record through the perspectives of two actors in its events. Greek immigrant Louis Tikas, a genuine historical figure, is a young union organizer who sticks with the strikers to the end, trying all along to prevent violence on the strikers' part. Fourteen-year-old Luisa Mole is the orphan of a Welsh miner and his Mexican wife. In eight-line, predominantly pentameter stanzas, Mason follows Louis' and Luisa's trajectories, his to death, hers to survival and a subsequent life on society's margins. Periodically, Mason interjects his own memories of learning about Ludlow and his family's tangential connection to it as well as the rage and pity, and the solidarity with the poor and oppressed, that Ludlow still evokes.