Craig Czury

Craig Czury Poems

Craig Czury Biography

Craig Czury (born March 10, 1951 in Kingston) is an American poet. Born in Kingston, to Betty Kawalkiewicz. He was adopted shortly thereafter by John and Nelda Churry. As a young man, Czury grew up in the northeastern Pennsylvania coal mining region near Shamokin, in the Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. Growing up in this area helped Czury identify strongly with the coal region. When Czury was seven-years-old, the Susquehanna River flooded the Knox Anthracite Coal Mine in Luzerne County, the Knox Mine disaster, which killed 12 miners and left thousands of others out of work. The disaster crippled the economic foundation of the area. Loss, abandonment, displacement and leaving would become major themes in his poetry. After he graduated from Dallas High School in Dallas, Pennsylvania, Czury drifted between several colleges and various temporary jobs across the United States. He spent 15 years hitchhiking across the country, working temporarily in carnivals, warehouses, and kitchens. He attended Hiram Scott College and Western Nebraska Community College, both in Scottsbluff, Nebraska. Czury then moved to the University of Montana in Missoula, before attending Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.)

The Best Poem Of Craig Czury

Bogside Murals

at a glance
will arrest you

will stop you in your tracks

and search you
armed with stone and mortar

full force in the face

painting these walls must have been a fistfight

plastic bullet words

petrol bomb brushstrokes

paint stirred in the blood
with blood and smoke

there will never be a peace settlement between

mural billboard graffiti

no plaster decommissioning

when these walls start talking to you
it's time to rethink your life

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