Caerphilly Miners - A Coal Miner’s Legacy Poem by Sidi Mahtrow

Come walk with me over the hills
Where the lands are covered with scrub.
Beneath are veins that were once rich with coal
Now empty caverns dark, wet and cold.
There’s no life here only a trace
Of the presence of man working the face.
Where men earned a daily wage
To support families now grown old.

The children know not what is there
Only that now no one seems to care.

The rotting remains of timbers and spikes driven deep
Into the rock for support and to keep
The earth from regaining its own;
Life isn’t here, it's gone.
Gone to another world
And another time.

Have you an idea of the dirt and the grime
That covered them all, young and old?

Yet if you could return to the earlier day
You would hear the sounds of children at play.
Laughing, then crying as they heard the news
That another cave-in had happened in the mews.
What family would face an uncertain future
With no one to provided for children and mother?

It’s easy to condemn the mine for taking away
The men who worked underground that day.

Not recognizing that these were families
Who saw the mines as their destinies.
To earn a hard-scrapple living for sure
But the work provided for a means to endure
And succor their loved ones who
Were dependent upon the mines.

Coal, the life-blood of the nation
Extracted a price from each generation.

Now the men who survive
Are still blacked by the dust
That makes their time here on earth
A misery that others can’t understand.
For it’s a black death
Unlike the one before.
It's of another kind to befall man.

But ask them one or all, if they would do it again
And they will say, it was the only way.

Times were hard then and so much different now
That it’s hard for one whose not been there to understand
That these were workers that welcomed the jobs, to a man.
For the alternative was darker that the coal
Here was work for those both meek and bold.
To do other was not an option for their wives and lovers
Needed support to create a life better than most.

Yet their children and their children wonder why
These men would risk the dangers, where some would surely die.

And the answer is chiseled deep in a marble stone
That stands in a graveyard, alone.
It gives the name and date of the end of a life
That labored to save his family from strife.
And it's a testament to the will of men
Who saw working for a living, not ever a sin.

And on the stone is a bit of verse
That recognizes that these mines were a curse.

But deep in the earth below,
Those men rest in peace
For you must know
It was their sacrifice to the living.
They’d do it again
If asked, today.

For life must go on
And they paid the price.