3 Sonnets

Miner's Sonnet #1

The cage door slams and down the shaft we fall
The rope that holds our lives the first set trap 
Of many heartless ways that death may call
To transport us in its eternal wrap  

The roof that hangs low o'er my lamp-lit head
May just decide to slip and down-ward drop
The work's too hard for me to dwell on dread
That comes from cracking sounds of failing prop

We hew and hack the black and shining seam
As with no warning firedamp slyly creeps
One fatal spark will light the gassy stream
A man is gone, his lonely widow weeps 

Though peril tracks the collier's daily grind
We are within its thrall of pay entwined


Miner's Sonnet #2

With comrades brave to work each day I'd go 
Joking as back and forth the wit and craic
We'd scarce be fear'd or cowed or weakness show
We knew our brothers always had our back

Communities were built on mines and coal
One whole and nourished, fed by that dark pit
The bond we had held tight within our soul
Strong as atoms no government could split 

With pride we marched together as one kin
In war the ranks of blue against us stood
Knowing that should we either lose or win
We'd pay for our revolt in flesh and blood

Yet danger lurked and lives were harsh and tough 
The death of coal did come not soon enough

Miner's Sonnet #3

The strike is lost; so back to work we go
The fire has gone; the will to fight is slain
The comradeship continues down below
But things will never be the same again  

There's coal down there and they all know the price
But no-one counts the cost of human pain
No jobs, no hope, a village slowly dies  
Our leaders arrogant in their disdain

A collier's spirit I will surely find
At school I failed; or was it failing me
I'll not allow despair to rule my mind
Can I a new trade learn at fifty-three? 

Leave behind the only life I've ever known
My future I must plan and I must own

(c) Tim Fellows 2017

Ten Minutes

In the long history of mining there are many large scale disasters that made the news - scores of lives taken in a single, horrible incident. But there are also thousands of individual accidents where men were taken. On 21st February 1935 my great-uncle Jim Hooper went to work at Parkhouse No 7 colliery in Clay Cross (known as the Catty Pit) and never came back. I did some family history research and uncovered the full story in a newspaper article of the time. This poem is a simple retelling of that article - the thing that was so striking for me was that he was so close to the end of his shift.

"Just one more tub

Give it a shove

Ten minutes we'll be done

Get out of here

at ten o'clock

And we'll be going home"

But fate had plans

For a mining man

No journey home for Jim

His pals were scarcely

yards away

when the roof caved in on him

Thirty tons of

rock and coal

A groan was all they heard

His comrades dug

and cleared in vain

their desperation shared

The doctor came

down in the mine

Four hours it took in all

But life had gone

when he was found

The doctor made the call

Around the quiet

grave they stood

His grieving widowed mother

Teddy, George and

My grandad Bill

His three surviving brothers

His sister, girlfriend,

working pals

they came to say goodbye

Just a lad

a score in years

They must have wondered why..

In a Clay Cross pit 

he was lost

One more brave mining lad

Swallowed whole

in the quest for coal

What life may he have had?

Ten minutes more

that was all

Jim would have walked away

From the face

back to his mum

To live another day

When he'd return

to that dark place

To hew the black coal seam

Day on day

his life to pass

Ten minutes killed the dream

(c) Tim Fellows 2017

In memory of James Ernest Hooper 1915-1935

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