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.
