As a child and to teenage years, I lived in Wattstown. This poem is about the start of miner's fortnight and the start of the pit horses hols....Rowland Hughes..
SHAFT OF NIGHT Horse shoes grate against the cobbled yard. Warriors of darkness frisk in the blinding light, seeing only with the sound of the haulier's voice. Eyes looking inward, searching for a rope to follow, a rail to guide them home.
They kick at the light, tormented by its nakedness. Huddling in a corner, feeling for the shelter of darkness. With his secret command, the haulier restrains their confusion and his team falls into line.
Three proud colliery horses stand alert, ready to march into their field of confinement. Two weeks of bewilderment, where their eyes stare towards sounds of a passing tractor, and ears prick to the last song of the blackbird, learning quickly the call of night.
WHEN
When archaeologists of a thousand years hence unplug the forgotten world of a Nation's pride, when the water of an enduring night is sucked from the black rock tunnels and bought by the curious, said to contain the tears of William John, a haulier whose body was never found and whose spirit still searches for the horse that disappeared into a bottomless pit, when the shafts re-open to the light and visitors stare through a glass case at the skull of a child, pretending to know someone whose ancestor was a miner, they will be told of hardship and deprivation and feel sickened by the sight of exploitation, they will thank God that such working conditions no longer exist. And they will never understand why its closure caused so much pain.
Rowland Hughes
Lush with a thousand shades of green, a valley ploughed from the garden of God's earth. Silent hills that speak through the minds of dreamers, and the silent wind echoing sounds of the past.
Weathered with time like grooves set in faces of old men; once Mam's boys proud to work at their fathers' side. Fathers and sons toiled together in the bowels of the earth, tearing out the heart of the valley – digging for coal.
Our valley darkened with a thousand shades of blackness, and the hills veiled in a delicate cloak of black silk. Chimney stacks towering above pit heads defying the law of gravity. Clouds of steam billowing upward, to be thrust downward by the sky, repulsing its impurities.
Mounds of coal growing out of the valley floor like cancers on the landscape. Sounds of trams crashing against trams, and machinery groaning with exhaustion. Sounds of men coughing and spitting, gasping through dust embedded lungs. Men's sun starved faces as white as mother's milk, blackened with coal dust. Young boys were old men, and old men were worn out.
The silent wind echoing sounds of the past. Silent hills that speak through the minds of dreamers. Lush with a thousand shades of green, a valley ploughed from the garden of God's earth.
Rowland Hughes