Silent stands
The winding gear
The pithead sealed
Five and twenty year
Miners no longer toil
With honest dignity
Coal now comes
On boats across the sea
Silent stands
The eerie monument
To stubborn arrogance
And bad judgement
Rust abounds
As far as you can see
The mining gone for good
That’s Scargill’s legacy
I remember many years ago
when the distant siren told us all
the shift had ended.
Yet! Six pints to be drunk before
stumbling through the back door,
his sweat still clinging to his face
sealed there with in the grime of despair
swearing every night, never to go back
to that bloody pithead!
But our need was he and his was the beer
until that fateful day, when out of his misery
he was taken, leaving us all for another world,
his need of pain forgotten when distributed
to those of us left behind.
Yet every day I still see him
in your smile in your ways,
and when you are sad Dear Daughter
in those beautiful ‘Ice Blue Eyes’.
© Harry J Horsman 2008
It is the solemn evening song that drifts,
into the valley cup, from the saucer of the moon,
and spreads in wings of darkness, nightshade breath;
arising as molecules of black oil, up from the pithead mouth,
following to the shower stalls, disrobing of the filth,
to hunch below the steaming spray, absolved of dirt and death.
On then, to the concrete block beside the rugby pitch,
where yellow light bleeds damply from the condensation panes,
and into atmosphere, plagued tobacco smoke and gusting beer;
sorrows drowned in pints of ale, pulled foaming from the taps,
the glasses raised and toasted to the ending of the day,
in the fog and mist of hops and fumes the hurt will disappear.
The old boys hold their tongues and smile their toothless smiles,
the cancer in their lungs as grim and fibrous as malignant roots,
unfolds a steady, lazy spread, the wings of metastasis;
until the end of Pithead days, when slaughter of the proudest land,
and plunder of the earth desists, slain by some politic,
who and in what sanity pretext dreamed such a life as this?
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