Manchester Triptych

!

Floret of flame, echo of the big bang,

Flinging innocent creation apart,

Flaying thin skin from an orderly world,

Punching and pummelling breaking bodies,

Undoing flesh with nuts and bolts and screws,

Undoing families in a moment,

Undoing this cause through its own effect,

Discounting the life which this is the sum,

Discounting lives summarily totalled,

Immaculate lives blown out in a flash.

?

Who the bomber? One dressed in his best vest,

High on the opiates of his people?

Or higher, two miles high, super sonic

And scratching the sky so close to the void?

Or miles out to sea, maybe, on a cruise?

Or cruising through cyber space and zapping

Pixilated people deaf to the drone?

And who the victims? Outlines coloured in

With bold strokes broad enough to blur edges,

Such simplified figures, which children count?

$ + £…

Words are not cheap, they do cost lives, spoken

With redacted care to prick sentiments

With forked tongues, justifying calls to arms

For the hundred years and more war, all one

Global war over branding, re-branding,

Bottom lines, arrayed on banners, dressed up

In various uniforms, or civvies,

Obscured by common words, such as Great War,

Second World, Cold and Hot, Insurgency.

And then, on the home front, comes a flash point.

Dave Alton 

Underground Unaware

like the insignificant drop in an ocean

like the merest dot

like the vaguest notion

like the hint of a fleck

like the point of a pin

i am the speck

which has crept within

your long-term resident guest

silently lining your lungs

like soot darkening a chimney breast

laboured breathing will be the norm

as your respiratory system i deform

inflammation fibrosis 

cavities nodules and necrosis

will give you 

a chronic cough shortness of

breath and cyanosis

coal workers fear me as a diagnosis

why 

i am yours truly pneumoconiosis 

or

 when extracting your last breath

death

i am legion

i am everywhere

i am no germ seeking germ warfare

i am just

as 

recorded in common prayer

dust

which you inhaled 

underground unaware

so ironic so unfair

 stan duncan

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 

What's That Wheel For?

"What's that half wheel?"

My daughter asked

"I see them everywhere"

How could she not

know what it is

or the reason they are there?

"What they were for",

I said to her

"When made into a wheel;

Was to wind the miners

down to work

Did they not tell you in school?"

If they just teach

of kings and queens;

of wars and ancient times

What will we know

of pits and coal;

Of working in the mines?

It's up to us

who lived the days

where memories are so clear

To keep alive the history;

don't let it disappear

The half-wheel's there

to remind us all

of the people of our town

They became our heritage

and we must not let them down.

(c) Tim Fellows 2017

To The People...

Hewer and Drags-man,

Driller, loader, barrow-man and breaker,

Farrier and sparks,

(The only sparks made welcome underground)

Chippy and blacksmith,

Bands-man, timberer,

Banksman, hurrier,

Putter and pick-man…

Fuelers of progress,

Of light,

Of heat,

Of…

The nation and its possibilities.

Danger down there, it’s said, and comradeship,

Told by the very tongues that tasted coal,

That were irrigated by spit-polished

Lozenges of it, that heaved kibbles full

From face to surface.

There’s testimony

Of wives who would turn their faces towards

The headstock and wonder about rock falls

And the striking of rogue sparks and blue flames.

And railwaymen who had to haul away

Truck-loads of the black tonnage from pitheads

On muscular shoulders of their locos.

And the mums and dads who shovelled the slack

And cobs across their modest hearths, or lit

The gas to feed their families, or flicked

The switch to illuminate their lives through

The mystery of electricity.

All knew then of darkness, dust and danger,

Knew there was a cost to convenience,

Knew tall, bleak-black headlines, like tombstones carved

From anthracite, when that cost was blasted

Or buried in debit columns of names.

And the owners knew the price of safety

Would have to be off-set against profit.

A wage rise subtracted from dividends,

Shorter days worked diminished their leisure,

And

That socialist devils make mischief

For idle hands. Far better, then, to press

Colliers to the coalface, their families

 Into narrow double-rows, their wages

To a minimum. Production to a

Maximum, or lock the colliery gates.

But,

Those socialist devils make mischief

For working hands, hands that cut the coal

Fuelling

Factories and mills and workshops

And foundries for

Making the munitions,

Weaving battledress, manufacturing

The instruments and rolling out the steel,

For the guns and the bombers, for soldier,

Sailor and airman, for the fitting out

Of naval vessels, tanks and landing craft

The tore the swastika from the flagpoles

Of Europe.

                                Miners did this, made it all

Happen and then could not return their pits

To the ancient Reich of the coal owners.

“For the people, by the people!” This was

Inscribed in red on to the swelling heart

Of the nation, demanded by the voice

Of the nation and grasped in the clenched fist

Of the nation.

                                Sweet, oh so very sweet

On tongues of colliers…NATIONALISATION!

For

Hewer and Drags-man,

Driller, loader, barrow-man and breaker,

Farrier and sparks,

Chippy and blacksmith,

Bands-man, timberer,

Banksman, hurrier,

Putter and pick-man…

Fuelers of progress,

Of light,

Of heat,

Of…

The nation and its possibilities.

                                                              

                                                               Dave Alton

Haiku - For International Women's Day

On Sunday, 5^th March, International Women’s Day was celebrated at the National Coalmining Museum. Amongst a plethora of events the resident poetry group, Coalshed Poets, invited attendees to pen a haiku.

It’s scary the unknown,

How do we look forward in hope?

Present in turmoil!

Anon

Only source of light,

It’s precious, lives depend on it

Down this deep, black hole.

Anon

Out in drizzling rain,

Almost like coal mining is a game

Against society’s gain.

Moira

Cold, wet March morning

Gathering to celebrate

Women and the mines

Tim Fellows

Driving here today

Windscreen wipers stopped working

Feeling very stressed!

Sheila Bradford.

Damp and wet

Many memories

Let’s celebrate

Richard Opasiak

On a wet March day

We women came to Caphouse

For songs and poems

Jane Loe

Cycling alone

To the end of the Pennines.

Drink? Toilet? Or both?

Clare Furness

The Old Miners

Down the long throat of shaft their bodies caged

in bony stoops, rammed joints, scrubbed skin,

they’re heard now for that guttural crack

back of the throat brimmed cough,

its spittle of spent black dust

from an earth-life below,

deep-down as the pockets of city toffs.

They lived by tonnage and beamed light,

the shot-blown or bad dreamed blast. The wedge

of each pit prop a third arm or handy leg

that helped raise the sunken roof of seam.

Hackers, drillers at the unbroken face,

they broke through, they broke through,

digging out what spoke for them.

                                                                  G.F. Phillips (1949 – 2017)