Monday 8 May 2017

The Oaks Madonna

7th May, 2017, saw the unveiling of the monument commemorating those men and boys who died in the 1866 Oaks Pit Disaster. This poem was composed for, and read at, that event.

December, the hurrier month
Towards the coming of the light,
Excited anticipation
In a match struck and the advent
Candle flame. Children counting on
Coal dusted dads able to hew
Pounds and pence enough, even as
That near Christmas candle burned blue.

Etching, hand coloured and showing
Wives gathering at the pithead
Just as the maw of the main shaft
Belches fire. They’d have known the dead
Numbered their colliers. Amidst them,
Anthracite hair hurriedly styled,
Spilling down her spine over shawled
Shoulders, a Madonna and child.

Calamity wrought and rendered,
Firstly in fibre glass, and then
Bronze, to bear so tragic a weight
Of all those lives, of all those men
And boys, whose silent names will lie
Along her monumental tongue,
An eternal lament always
On the tip, about to be sung.

 The Oaks’ Madonna realised
By artist, etcher and sculptor,
This trinity fabricating
A real vision of truth in her,
A young pitman’s wife made widow
In a moment, having to cope
Because of the child in her arms,
The child being the advent of hope.


                                                                Dave Alton 


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