There is a
fascination about a fire of coal;
Watch it flinging a delicate tracery of intertwining light
Against the dark shadow of the chimney.
Flickering in spontaneous patterns upon the blackness;
Sinuous coil and recoil;
Frenzied reds
and
yellows
Leaping, lithe and living
through the dead smoke caverns of the chimney-piece.
Born of the coal.
Sprung from the womb of its mother, the coal;
Light and heat spawned in the young earth;
The embryonic world, yet unravished, a virginal sweetness of lush
life
Thrusting upward to the light;
To the warm light;
To the warmth of the young prolific world.
Trunk and branch and leaf of the tall tree,
Rich fronds of the fern,
Waving in the warm light,
Green
life yielding to the bounty of the sun.
Born of the coal,
And the torturing cataclysms changing the face of the world;
Of the vast violence of water drowning the
green
life of the forest;
Of the tearing asunder of the young world;
Of the spewing up of mountains in the convulsive spasms of change;
Of the cruel glacier, scarring the earth with the creeping agony of
cold.
Born of the coal is the flame,
And the pattern of blood
on the hearth;
The pattern of blood
and torn bodies;
True as the fossils of leaf-patterns found upon shale.
But, these patterns are only for me,
And those like me.
Born to the dismal valleys of coal;
Born to the grey
mountains of slag and shale;
The dominant mounds of drab ugliness;
The
grey
mounds emerging from the mined deeps of the earth,
Casting their dull shadow upon my days,
Upon all my days, darkeningly;
Even from my hour of birth,
And before,
On the night of the love-lust of my conception,
Spinning sickeningly to life,
yet in the shadow of the grey
mounds,
And the roar
Of whirring wheels.
My first eyes see the
flickering lamps of the miners
Speckled against the dark of the mountain;
My first sound,
The spang of steel-shod shoes on the hard ground,
And the clang and the clatter of wheels.
The lamps, I find,
Disappear slowly, and one by one.
In dawns that are gone,
When the grey
mounds sprawled darker in the opalescent loveliness of morning,
The sky, incarnadined,
Twisting crimson
fingers about the gaunt frames
And the turning wheels,
Touched them with prescience of
blood.
But, coal to be mined,
And yet more coal;
And, dawn by dawn, the lamps fading slowly, and one by one.
Dawn by dawn, year by year,
Under the dark shadows of the
grey mounds,
Born of the coal,
The grim pattern was traced
inexorably;
Coal to be mined;
Toil and mutilation;
Hardship and death;
Poverty and hunger;
Blood to the turning wheels,
Into the heritage of coal starkly woven.
But these are my patterns,
And of those like me.
Watch the delicate tracery of intertwining light
Against the dark shadow of the chimney;
And the flames, lithe and alive,
Leaping, born of the coal,
So fascinating!
