Miners Poems

Australia takes her pen in hand
To write a line to you,
To let you fellows understand
How proud we are of you.
...

There was a whispering in my hearth,
A sigh of the coal.
Grown wistful of a former earth
It might recall.
...

It was over at Coolgardie that a mining speculator,
Who was going down the township just to make a bit o' chink,
Went off to hire a camel from a camel propagator,
And the Afghan said he'd lend it if he'd stand the beast a drink.
...

Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions every one
And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on
I tried to call them back but unbidden they are gone
Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away
...

PROLOGUE

There's something in a flying horse,
There's something in a huge balloon;
...

STARTING from fish-shape Paumanok, where I was born,
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother;
After roaming many lands--lover of populous pavements;
...

AFTER all, not to create only, or found only,
But to bring, perhaps from afar, what is already founded,
To give it our own identity, average, limitless, free;
...

WEAPON, shapely, naked, wan!
Head from the mother's bowels drawn!
Wooded flesh and metal bone! limb only one, and lip only one!
...

I remember those long hot Summers as if they were yesterday,
When the sun shone down on our street, the place I loved to play.
For many a window glistened, cleaned well to a sparkling shine,
Where starched white shirts blew gaily, on many a washing line.
...

There's many a schoolboy's bat and ball that are gathering dust at home,
For he hears a voice in the future call, and he trains for the war to come;
A serious light in his eyes is seen as he comes from the schoolhouse gate;
He keeps his kit and his rifle clean, and he sees that his back is straight.
...

POET.

O A new song, a free song,
...

Under starry skies she paints canvas of Vincent's life
Each shiny star a glimmer of hope in his tragic life
A falling star like a teardrop falls on her wet canvas
Her moist eyes holding back so many tears of endured pain
...

Back in his room at Denise's bakery,
Vincent placed his new drawings on the table.
Looking at it, he felt he had made shabby sketches.
He copied them into a new sheet of paper,
...

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island
Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy."
She remembers trying to eat a banana
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
...

(Note: — Pocahontas is buried at Gravesend, England.)

"Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May — did she wonder? does she remember — in the dust — in the cool tombs?"
...

Vincent had to take a quick decision!
He should either run away from the Borinage,
Or stay in Borinage and live like the miners,
To serve the miners, not just by preaching alone,
...

The life of a miner anywhere in the world is pathetic,
Most of their lives, they live in darkness!
Deep down in the mine, it is dark, black and suffocating.
The air around them is full of coal dust and poisonous gas.
...

Vincent did not write to his father or to his brother Theo
Of what he was doing presently in this miner's town.
Theo had not written to him for a whole year.
His family was very upset with him.
...

The Blue Horizon wuz a mine us fellers all thought well uv,
And there befell the episode I now perpose to tell uv;
'T wuz in the year uv sixty-nine,--somewhere along in summer,--
There hove in sight one afternoon a new and curious comer;
...

After six hours in Marcasse with Jacques, from lack of air,
Vincent felt faint, panting, choking, with heat and dust.
He felt he could not endure this torture anymore.
He was thankful to Jacques when they decided to return.
...

there has always been an elite class
the coal mine owner with coal miners
in the dark historic working 12 hours
...

With my palomino horse, I ride across Montana. Thinking about the Lakota who had total freedom before, the coming of the iron horse, and the miners, the destruction of the environment, and the people who lived on Buffalo herds, and had a way of life cruelly taken from them.
Michael Cochrane © 2023
...

there were professions
where workers worked in darkness night
ancestors were coal miners...
...

Vincent did not write to his father or to his brother Theo
Of what he was doing presently in this miner's town.
Theo had not written to him for a whole year.
His family was very upset with him.
...

Back in his room at Denise's bakery,
Vincent placed his new drawings on the table.
Looking at it, he felt he had made shabby sketches.
He copied them into a new sheet of paper,
...

In the depth of pain,
beneath those rocks,
they lost their precious lives
like autumn leaves
...

All along, a doubt nagged and kept gnawing
Deep inside the psyche of Vincent,
Even during the period of his learning
To become a priest or a preacher.
...

The miners requested Vincent to hold services
For the fifty seven people, who had lost their lives,
And for the lost souls earlier to the accident, as well.
Over hundred people gathered in Vincent's tiny hut.
...

Life is like a boat,
It appears to move calmly in serene lake.
That's when you feel
Like a swan moving in tranquil water.
...

Vincent had to take a quick decision!
He should either run away from the Borinage,
Or stay in Borinage and live like the miners,
To serve the miners, not just by preaching alone,
...