https://m.soundcloud.com/paul_laurence/the-hill-in-the-light

in the hearing of pigeons
cooing in the twilight
you can hold out to the dark land
make the crunch of your boot
squelch in the hard washed
and screened lives of miners

all to be buried again. Beneath.
If going beneath into pressured dark
who but the ghost of ‘Jacksy’.
All to be buried like Gary Jackson.
They called him ‘Jacksy’ in the showers.

It was on a Wednesday. Seven days
after his thirty seventh birthday
he did not want to spend three quarters
of a shift cleaning the belt. He was
spading muck from a belt wheel
with his mate seventeen year old ‘Big’
Mick. His spade got caught in the wheel
he should have stopped beforehand.

Belt drew him in. Cut his head neatly
into two pieces. In a snap of the fingers
Mick simply watched it happen.
The slow cut. A second passed.

It took seven men to peel and carry Gary
from the belt. The funeral took place
on the third day. ‘Big’ Mick was given
a month’s leave. He never recovered.

After his leave Mick had a seated job
down the belt on which Gary had died.
Suddenly and throughout the day
he was called on the pit phone by another
miner calling himself “The ghost of Gary
Jackson”. He could tell it was another
miner. They put a notice up in the showers
and the phone calls stopped.

A great mound of slag is being reseeded.
They have spread the difficult earth.
Taken him from a birth in the pressured dark
and scattered his broken body as waste
and reseeded with hawthorn, fern willow
and couch grass. These plants knit
together the broken flesh. His pieces
reassembled into a hill in the light.
His broken body held tense by roots
fed by rain and light. He is different now.

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