Come gather 'round, friends   And I'll tell you a tale   Of when the red iron ore pits ran plenty   But the cardboard filled windows   And old men on the benches   Tell you now that the whole town is empty      In the north end of town   My own children are grown   But I was raised up on the other   In the wee hours of youth   My mother took sick   And I was brought up by my brother      The iron ore poured   As the years passed the door   The drag lines an' the shovels was a-humming   Till one day my brother   Failed to come home   The same as my father before him      Well, a long winter's wait   From the window I watched   My friends, they couldn't have been kinder   And my schooling was cut   As I quit in the spring   To marry John Thomas, a miner      Oh, the years passed again   And the givin' was good   With the lunch buckets filled every season   What with three babies born   The work was cut down   To a half a day's shift with no reason      Then the shaft was soon shut   And my work, it was cut   And the firing air, it felt frozen   Till a man come to speak   And he said in one week   That number eleven was closin'      They complained in the East   That they are paying too high   They say that your ore ain't worth digging   That it's much cheaper down   In South American town   Where the miners work almost for nothing      So the mining gates locked   And the red iron rotted   And the room smelled heavy from drinking   Where the sad, silent song   Made the hour twice as long   As I waited for the sun to go sinking      I lived by the window   As he talked to himself   This silence of tongues, it was building   Then one morning's wake   The bed, it was bare   And I's left alone with three children      The summer is gone   The ground's turning cold   The stars, one by one, they're a-foldin'   My children will go   As soon as they grow   Oh, there ain't nothing here now to hold them