Although shut pits no longer spit their

Packed-grit, black, thick-slack phlegm from

Hacked pick-carved sun-starved bronchioles

 

Deep in the high-spine Pennines' pulsing chest,

Green-seeded heaps of spoil-hill snot still blot

The gang-scraped Yorkshire landscape

 

And make me hark back second-hand

To an almost-unremembered past when dad,

A flat-capped gap-toothed lad, was shipped off

 

To one of his dozens of cousins who culled coal

At Bowers Row in thirties' raw austerity

To learn a lesson of what life might be

 

If he would not apply himself assiduously at school.

Meningitis and the tide of war perhaps prevented

This apprentice painter from the pit's pull but

 

Maybe the visit did its bit to re-inspire him.

At Bowers Row, spring flowers grow now

Where all was soot-stained grey but there may

 

Still be some pale remembrance of a lad,

My dad, who made his one descent inside the mine,

Confined close-coffined in a pit-cage for a day.