Striking miners at Marikana.
Of course I have never
ventured under the ground
not even in an executive cage
with the other visitors
felt the hellish heat or
heard the demons drilling up
from belo
(everything that lives,
in whatever dimension,
just wants to be free
find a modicum of sunlight,
love, dignity
leave children for the future,
memory, posterity).
Wilfred Owen wrote once
of soldiers as miners, of
miners at war
digging in a darkness
explosively forbidding,
unforgiving of even the
slightest tactical mistake
down in the earth where
the bullets cannot get you, the
lie of wealth cannot touch you
dig further, down away from it all
it is immaterial how deep,
how far from the raging hearth
of humanity you do
find yourself, how
far below the seams of
currency-metal, beloved
metal for weapons, metals sacred
to the power of State and Faith
when we have dug
to our ending, to the blind
end of our tunnel
putting to our
supreme test easy
words of resurrection. – Damian Garside