Mine dawn

Dawn, the dawn before the dawn,
the drear day before day, a crevice
in the curtain and a hint, the scarcest touch,
a blush of dawn painted in dim pastel
on the wall beside the pillow –

the dull rush of a bomber, in feathered disarray
of swastika, bound defeated for the fatherland,
sticks of bomb-death spat in coils
of Catherine-wheels, harmless in black fields,
the Luftwaffe having happily lost Sheffield.

Dawn! The distant grunt of guns dissolves.
The pit-buzzer like some whirring cog
changes shifts, but no daylight – just
the never-ending scrape and rise and fall
of steel-capped boots and studs slurred
lazy on the paving by the window –
miners parting to the pit-yard and the cage;
miners coming back black-faced,
black-eyed, black-clothed, black-helmeted,
black-nailed – white men in sombre plumage.

Dawn! The slur of boot-steel on the brain
like chalk on dusty blackboards – or nails
ever bending back – the crash and click of shunting
in the sidings like giant steel-clad billiard-balls
steeped in the hiss and fart of steam, river-mist
in sulphur-methane balls; tank-engines
squat and black and numberless attacking
wagons gaunt with coal like cockroach
on unrubbered wheels, whistling like newspaper-boys.
How sunbeams huff through colliery dust!

The doctor’s son takes tea with nanny,
munches toast and sucks a pickled egg,
a jealous prize of war, and never asks
or seeks to want to know what miners
breakfast on, black in dark cottages.
He has, within his doors, a bath and privy
while theirs loiter outside; they bath in tubs
kettle-fed from kitchen-coals, their drab torsos
scrubbed slick with wire, paled from raw coal-dust
to a sick ivory where never soaks the sun.

A car chugs down the doctor’s hill,
heavy on leaden petrol rationed to the hilt
leaving smoke to blanche the frosted air
with messages in code only Comanche read.
Black like an abbreviated hearse, short and square,
a rolling bluebottle with mudguards for wings –
for all cars then were black and short and square –
horseless like a carriage, shaftless, shiftless,
this car sinks to the village surgery and the sick,
to backfire in futile arrogance at death.

Out of the valley of death they walk,
the mourners all decked out in Sunday best,
miners to a man, hatless in the coaldust
of a February dawn, led by white hair upon black suit,
the white-maned mining man with walking-cane
like some performer of the arts – a magician:
after him, a black and black-plumed mare,
drawing a cart like a curtain on slack cords,
black-draped to reveal the death-box cuboid;
after her, the crowd in crocodile and, last, the orphan.

From the direction of the cemetery, the great green gates,
the railings – the cage to keep the dead –
the shouting grave with teeth around of shovelled clay
and pallid sickly chiselled stones which list the dead;
from the direction of this desert flanked with flowers
descends a cart and horse, a rotund shire
with ribboned mane and surgically bobbed tail,
led by a jolly yellow-overalled Pickwickian tyke.
The cart is overwhelmed with churns of milk.
They run at it with jugs of chipped enamel!

Every day, mid-morning of the day,
the yellow man with udder hands descends
to blanche with milk the outstretched pails
of grey widows and mucky kids, ladling
great gobs in surreal avalanche.
Athwart his cart harnessed to this nag,
his milkman mind marauds the earlier fields
that lowed with cattle and their low-slung loads
when he with finger-tools and kiln-warmed palms
caressed and squeezed, squashed and cajoled...

Milk-fed, churn-brimmed, how drips
the urchin to the wood, soft bluebell wood!
His mother in his hand like some soft toy,
he stoops to hear the bluebells chime
and blows at her behest shocks
of dandelion clocks to flocks of clouds –
one o’clock; two o’clock; three o’clock –
he cannot count beyond o’clock
but turns his countless face to hers
for arithmetical tick-tock.

Halfway to the wood, soft bluebell wood,
there is a half-obliterated stump –
cut off at the knee like an impatient amputee –
a magic stump. How still he sits, in silence
wishing, his eye as tight as a cow’s teat,
never peeping, no slight gleam seeping!
Hour on hour he rumps the stump –
he measures hours by his dandelion clock!
And yellowly his wish comes true like sun.
And yellowly his wish comes true like sun.

Dawn gone, long gone like last year’s swallows
from storm-tugged reefs and wires – sun risen
high to noon – so soon the sun describes
a circling buzzard’s swoop into the death
of strawberry scoopful clouds; and snow flails
the black carcase of the bluebell wood
and with black magic turns the slag
of colliery waste to alps and tors, meringue
in which the noon-shift dawdles with a carol
on its lip and kicks the rolling snow.

In the love-heart of the wood, soft bluebell wood,
there is a ruined house, a windblown skull
with empty eyes for windows and rotted bone
for rafters. Only stubborn walls resist
though paper peels and plaster mutinies.
The urchin has sped home and lies before the coals
ripped from the fossil prison of the mines
to adorn the fossil pyre of the hearth.
On stomach, propped on elbows, feet kicking
in the air above, behind, he ruminates...

In the wood, in the ruined house,
through the empty eyes of windows,
from this grim mock-shelter, stare
the doleful eyes of the ghost child
who died within his home’s death-throes.
Outside, snowflakes fall like dying geese
one by one and two by two in ropes
of separating feathers: silently geese fall
in mesmerising repetition, honking mutely
as they drown in thousands in white satin seas.

Whining through the village, the shift-buzzer
breaks wind and heralds exodus.
They leave from two directions – and arrive –
the white men black against the snow,
the black men whitely faced with ice.
Gaunt, the wheel rotates and, stark against the sky,
the cage and inmates catch the cold smoke of their breath,
hesitate a gasp, and plummet like the damned to hell,
sure of warmth below, trains and wagons,
rails, canaries, ponies, gas – and coal.

A solitary lorry, wheels lassoed in chains,
crawls the doctor’s hill, fartingly insistent,
carting coal, belching copiously but with tact –
like a lady. It is all white smoke and steam
on a snowscape greying in the gathering dusk –
pale horses praying in the avalanche.
Reversed through roughly spade-kempt gates,
it shrugs off in isosceles perfection
this strange white cargo and departs.
The ghost-coal leans against the wall and smokes.

Hearthside, a scrubbed brass scuttle squats,
brass shovel, poker, tongs, the room and faces
yellowly reflected, black dust and slag within;
and on the grate all grades of red and orange
and filaments of coppered blue and green;
red heat before and shoulder-draught behind...
A toasting fork does its work with flash
efficiency and toast and dripping
(in the days before they found cholesterol)
are the opiate of the nightly feast.

The car is safely stranded by the snow-pile –
black white-cap by black white-cap,
like horses striding night-storm seas,
black water garlanded in manes of roses.
All are within. By the motheaten
black-out curtain the child peeps out.
Wheeling an ancient bicycle, scarved
and balaclava-ed snug against the storm,
the lamplighter strides out with his long
fish-pole to weave his extra stars.

Stars on lampposts that flicker with sad flame
pool pale shadows in a growing snow.
The miners’ boots ring no steel tympani
on these white flowerbeds; while
frozen petals seal the lonely grave,
where only gates and railings weep
unearthly tears that freeze. Shunting sounds
sodden in the snow, and metal melts on metal
as if afraid to dent the peace.
Distantly a war has waged and beings ceased.

Christmas brought the colliery band formed up in fours,
in brightest uniforms and highly polished
boots and faces. “Christians, Awake!”
awoke a house of Jews, but the ironic sin was –
whose? Where were the black men of the week
who shone so bright like magi without camels –
offering art-gifts they had mined and hacked and hewn,
coal-crotchets hung on staves? New Year,
a handbell-ringer and his three sons made brass sing;
and a front hall wore their ghost for one whole year.

Black at the last the night! Time passed.
No more the dandelion clock! No more
the bluebell wood! No more the tick and tock
and tolls! The stump is struck. The ruin is earth.
The ghost is gone. The shunting yards are still.
The rails and wagons rust, the sidings now rosebay,
dock-leaf and nettle. The yards are locked.
The mines are closed, are dumb, are blind.
The buzzers no more call the gangs to life.
No more a miner struts, nor slurs his feet.

Decades after... how thin the village walls!
Stores boarded up! House-windows bricked
and shuttered against what intemperance
of youth and clime! Graffiti idly inks drab walls
with misspelt idiocies daubed by gormless idiots.
To parade its ravaged streets and cross the hill
green in moss and weed is to dare the legions.
How timid seem the ghosts! But – turn your head
and hear a steel boot kick! Is that a black face
in the shadow? Is that a black mare on the hill?