Deep
Alan Buckley

Be a Miner. Because Britain Will Always Need Coal – National Coal Board advertisement, 1970s

Nineteen eighty-four, eighty-five.
They knew austerity long before
we did. An uncivil war.
They had to dig deep to survive.
Their fears would be proved right:
Close the pit and you might
as well put a sign at the school that says
DOLE OFFICE – THIS WAY.
But it was all such a long time ago.
Orgreave isn’t Hillsborough, or so
it’s claimed. Let sleeping
slag heaps lie. Let the grass grow.
Let puzzled children ask the meaning
of the word colliery.

Two hundred then. Now just three:
Thoresby, Hatfield, Kellingley.
And soon there’ll be none.
Thatcher called them the enemy within:
now, their last battalion
surrenders its arms. Let wheels spin,
and cable loop around its drum;
bring them to the surface, blinking
at the unforgiving light.
Chain the gates behind them,
watch them walk away from history,
into a country others voted for.
Maggie has her final victory,
and no one needs to dig deep any more.

Alan also wrote this piece in the Morning Star about his thoughts on the closing of Kellingley.

Alan Buckley’s second poetry pamphlet ‘The Long Haul’ is forthcoming from HappenStance. He works in Oxford as a psychotherapist, and as a school writer-in-residence for the charity First Story.

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