City of Eternal Night

City of Eternal Night is a lament for the town of Centralia, PA, a ghost town that's a 40-minute drive from my hometown. A fire of unknown origins (most likely a trash fire) seeped into the town's labyrinth of abandoned coal mines, causing the ground to become warm, plumes of carbon monoxide to rise from the earth, and sinkholes hundreds of feet deep to swallow backyards. After a 12-year-old boy nearly fell into a sinkhole, the town was evacuated and its properties seized by the state, yet an estimated five residents still live there among the boarded-up houses and smoke. I see in the Centralia tragedy a more extreme version of the collapse of coal country in general, especially the detrimental effects of reckless industry on communities; without any plans to move forward, even coal towns without a raging inferno are becoming ghost towns.

 

This piece evokes crackling fire, the fog of memory, and ghosts dancing in a long-dim ballroom, as well as a whole population desperately clinging to an imaginary, glorious past (the "eternal night") that they must ultimately accept as an illusion.