Jason Miller: Playwright, Actor and Director

Miller loved Scranton and Lackawanna County to the end. One day in his apartment, he and I were talking when he jumped up from his chair, and said, “You have to listen to this. I just found it today.”

He pulled out Carl Sandburg’s Honey and Salt from a stack of books and he opened it to a page where “Lackawanna Twilight” was printed. He read the poem to me:

Twilight and little mountain
Towns along the Lehigh, sundown
And grey lavender flush

Miners with dinner buckets and
Headlamps, state constabulary on
Horses, guns in holsters, Scranton,
Wilkesbarre, the Lackawanna Trail.

Twilight and the blessed armistice
Of late afternoon and early evening.
Twilight and the sports sheets, movies,
Chain programs, magazines, comics,
Revival meeting.
Twilight and headlights on the new
Hard roads, boy friend and girl friend,
Dreams, romance, bread, wages, babies.     Homes.

As they say on Broadway, he had a good run.

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