Miners
What has become of the caged
canary who lit up my life?
I hear the pit pines creaking.
Now nobody dares strike a match.
Birds descending in an iron cage,
our lungs blackened and scarred,
scared, we sing dark hymns
knowing we are doomed.
On hands and knees, we crawl
to the coal-black altars of our gods.
Blind from birth, pit ponies
trust us in their solitudes.
Don’t they know that when
the canary falls from its perch,
we’ll abandon them and claw
our way, anywhere, to safety?
Within the chalk tomb-tunnels
of my calcined skull,
a lone thought searches
an abandoned mine for a memory
it can no longer find.
rogermoorepoet 
Amazing imagery, Roger. Reminds me of Jez Lowe’s song ‘Galloways’, about pit ponies enjoying the sunshine after the darkness of the mines.
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Thanks, Colin. As I said below, we lived near the South Wales Coal Field, but we never worked in the mines. It touched all our lives, though.
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Oh, I love this, Roger. The Science and Industry Museum in Chicago has a “coal mine” tour. Before you enter the mine, you learn about the canaries. Your use of that imagery in this poem is stunning.
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I have never been down a coal mine, Tanya, though I have driven past them and read and written a lot about them, especially the coal mines in the Rhondda Valley. “When the coal comes from the Rhondda down the Merthyr Taff Vale line …” not my song, but an old and famous one. I remember the last great underground mining disaster in Wales. My parents worked with (and I knew) people who lost loved ones ‘down the mine’. A hard environment, and one which I was mercifully spared.
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The “mine” at the museum isn’t real, but it was designed to feel real. They even run mining equipment while you are inside to add to the experience. I can’t even imagine working in such a place. Mercifully spared is right.
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In the nineteenth century and early twentieth, they used young kids to work the smaller seams. Many of these seams were declared ‘unproductive’ later. Mining souvenirs: black coal dust coughed up from the lungs and spat out. “And every time I cough, I get a mining souvenir” Max Boyce (Welsh song-writer and poet).
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