How on earth did it come to this, a state

enshrined in a word he would never know,

 

wouldn’t even come to him on his walks

to and from the Cribbwr Seam’s defiant face?

 

‘Enshrined’ wouldn’t either, though she’d seen

his finger with its arc of black dust glide

 

at random across a page of her Middlemarch,

like it did when reminding himself of train times

 

to Church Stretton and Craven Arms – places

east of him and his spinning wheels in the cloud.

 

It was where she’d lived on quilted farmland, bound

by prosperity and the fragrances of ‘high church’;

 

and where she’d met him in ’26, a  son of toil come

with his neckerchiefed comrades to beg donations.

 

What was love?  ‘Twas not thereafter. Wenlock

to wedlock and beyond saw awakened dreams exposed

 

to the winds on the bryniau, those bare valley roofs

where they fled like willowherb or his running mobs.

 

One of her friends said it was not so much tragedy

as tragi-comedy: her six feet and his five-four, together

 

in that book on life at the longwall, his nose broken

not by a pony’s kick but a copper pan. So it was said.

 

Note: Longwall is a mine’s coal face.

Nigel Jarrett has published two collections of poetry: Miners at the Quarry Pool and Gwyriad. The first was described by Agenda magazine as ‘a virtuoso performance’ and the latter by Acumen magazine as ‘an engrossing window on to family relationships…but also ranging farther afield with perceptive meditations on many of the key moments in human existence expressed with humour and insight’. He has also published four collections of stories, a novel, and a fictional memoir. Jarrett is a former daily-newspaperman. He is a winner of the Rhys Davies prize and the inaugural Templar Shorts prize, both for short fiction. He lives in Abergavenny.