NaPoWriMo #18: The Beast Beneath the Coal

And so I've matched my previous NaPoWriMo record on day eighteen. With this in mind, here's a poem straight from the South Wales Valleys.

The Beast Beneath the Coal

Hills of coal in the southern valleys,
where miners made their homes,
the old ruins of their industry
scattered across the snow-swept slopes.

The beast dwells in the deep caverns
which the miners didn't reach.
Slumbering on a bed of coal
lined with slivers of gold,

no colliery knew of it,
no cavers ever stumbled on it,
and yet the scaly wonder
draws on the warmth
from the rocks above its lair,
waiting for the day
to erupt out of the valley
in a cloud of soot and flame.

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.)