Remnants

There sits a man by a lake in the cold valley,
hunched over, still, face as scarred as the old quarry
waiting for the wheel to turn, coal to flood back in.
Gone, those days, remnants of steel and masonry.

Snow settles, night draws in, freezes fireless furnace,
yet he sits by the lake, eyes the winding tower,
sits, waiting, hopes for the wheel to resume turning.
Black gold no more, the mine sleeps despite his yearning.

The Town I Forgot

There's a place that I keep forgetting,
a town in the hills from which iron and steel
ran down to the ports on rivers of coal.
Blaenavon they call it.

It clings to the walls of the valley,
a shadow of the glory days
when fumes rose from the steelworks
and the wheel of Big Pit kept turning.

Nan ruled the café on the high street.
Some say she ruled the whole town.
Certainly the best Welsh cakes
came from her kitchen.

Half my ancestry lived in this town,
in the shadow of the old mines,
the furnaces and the hills.
Some of them still do.

When it snows in Blaenavon
the streets are impassable.
A snowball to the eye never hurt anyone,
not with a cup of tea to look forward to.

I went back to the town I forgot.
Everyone still knows everyone else,
and the winds are cold
down the perpetual high street.

Houses I knew and visited
belong to someone else.
All the old faces are gone.
The others all shelter in the valleys.

Someday I will go back
to that town in the coal hills,
and see what they left behind.

(This is a poem is a tribute to the town of Blaneavon, where many generations of my family lived.)