For the National Union of Mineworkers

The block of shiny black carbon, among cards
on my mum’s mantelpiece, is losing meaning
as her memory and our collective spirit wane.

It's never been lit, but is fired with significance:
digging it cost lives, destroyed families,
the union fought every step of the way;

the smell of eons, of compressed swamp,
peat crushed to unbearable pressures, endless
time spent unbidden between seams of rock.

The echo of the controlled explosion
and cut of diamond-tipped band saw,
the rattling ride on the travelator

carted to the surface, carded,
weighed and away. Miners shaped
this deep blackness that glitters still.

Was it on a second or third trip
that one of the striking miners
decided to lug it down south,

thinking to recognise her effort,
thinking she would appreciate
what others would find a strange gift

in thanks to the support group,
who knew it was a fight to the end—
a tribute, an emblem of struggle.

Ben Bruges works in education, is co-Features Editor for Hastings Independent and has poems published in Interpreter’s House, Banyan Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Write Under the Moon, Memoirist, Howling Owl, Creaking Kettle & Elizabeth Royal Patton Memorial Poetry Competition anthologies. Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, complimented the poems “for their density, thoughtfulness and cleverly pausing rhythms. [They] manage to make the urban city-scape resonate like a pastoral one.” ”