Trapper, scholar, Shakespeare’s custodian,
Unlettered pit-boy
out of Percy Main,
Illuminating the
blackboard darkness
With the lamp of
his imagination.
Hewer of knowledge
from the dust and gas,
Picker of words
from amongst cobs of coal,
Drawing on fossils
of creation
With a stick of
chalk. Then his poet’s soul
Took wing, flying
up and out of the shaft,
His tongue no
longer tainted by the damps,
Though never lost
the taste for those who graft
In the petrified
colons of the earth,
Pressed between
floor and roof into the cramps
Of crevices, when
every shift could be
The very last for
all eternity.
His verse –
their voice, their words – his poetry.
Balladeer for
those who had no reason to rhyme,
Who had no talent
for pens, had no time
To make their
marks on paper, a collier
Working those rich
seams of community,
Willing to dig
deep and ever deeper.
When the roof fell
in, when the beam broke free,
He told the tale
with truth and strict metre.
Miner poet, his
three score and ten spent,
Returned to the
Tyne where, to the theatre
Deep underground,
a seven year old was sent.
Dave Alton
