Visit To A Colliery: Pit Village, Beamish Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Visit to a Colliery: Pit Village, Beamish
A landscape in the shadow of a pit,
Coal dust has settled everywhere like sand
Even the cobbled streets are smeared with it

Underground is seamed like arteries
Of Saturn, Satan, long funereal bands
The ghosts of miners dead two centuries

Fourteen years old, coal pickers became men
Son followed father, dismal lives pre-planned
Into the foetid depths of that black wen

Even their snot, their tears, were streaked with coal
Their lungs were silted up, sweat, treacle-tanned
Ran down their backs. Mines claimed them, flesh and soul

They toiled like moles, wriggled like graveyard grubs
Some blotted out the dark in a steel band
Or turned to Masons, Methodists or pubs

Some dreamt of gas explosions, Poor Relief
When comrade's death would mark them like a brand
No tin-bath scrub could wash away that grief