And when retirement came, after fifty years down the mine, <br />Man and boy, man and boy, boyhood turned too soon into the man <br />As he had seen things that no teenage child should see, alas, <br />All there remained was husk, a shell, a dust-dry chrysalis <br />From which the butterfly had failed to hatch full formed. <br />The rasping lungs, foul phlegm and hacking cough affirmed <br />How he had been all rendered dry by the overpowering pit: <br />Sucked dry by hot foetid underground air, playing its part <br />In the role of that precursor of a hell in an unwritten book; <br />Sucked dry by the constant ache of arm and thigh and back <br />That strove all those long years to hew the bright-black stone; <br />Sucked dry by memory of lost pals and relatives, that stain <br />Where rock fall or grim gas had murdered senselessly his kith and kin; <br />Sucked dry by other losses too, as time, for reasons quite beyond his ken <br />Where once fine fresh-faced lads encountered time that marched <br />Double-paced, to the graveyard, all ragged and besmirched. <br />But still upon his face there shone a pride, and not the shine <br />Of black-diamond anthracite, the customary ingrained sheen <br />That could not be removed (what irony) , by even coal-tar soap <br />Nor even gleam of gold reflecting that of the proffered sop <br />To his long-service, a cheap watch, that his masters at the mine <br />Demeaned themselves to give to him. But still the inner man <br />Revealed a glow of some sense of self-accomplishment and grit <br />Where he had played his bit-part role in making Britain great <br />And, in that moment, there was perhaps unleashed another angle - <br />A glimpse of iridescent scaly wings, not butterfly but angel.<br /><br />C Richard Miles<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-old-miner/
