Emily Cotterill

                        I have loved coal,

                        like a teenage girl loves an older guitarist

                        with a rough black smudge of eyeliner.

                        I have built my life on it,

                        screamed down decades for it,

                        COAL NOT DOLE – bared my soul for it,

                        but old women gossip about the pit.

                        I know the world has had enough of it.

                        Coal – with its head full of history,

                        strong arms, filthy engines, heavy,

                        the small town sex of it.

                        Broken bodies, white knuckle wives,

                        the silence of canaries – has risen

                        from slag heaps and pit heads to thick air

                        spluttering into anyone born

                        late with an old miner's lungs.

                        I have loved coal but recently,

                        when I sit in the fresh place built

                        on the scar of my grandfather’s pit,

                        I have loved birdsong, greenspace,

                        the safety and hope of it –

                        wind turbines, rising white beacons,

                        sharp armed, slicing clean paths

                        to a future.