Seacoalers. Lynemouth. 1985.
A novel harvest of the seashore
(Caught By The Camera. No. 27. 1935)
Around the hooves of the blinkered horse
the sea recedes with a zishhhhhhhhhhh.
The cart stands axle deep in seething water.
The blade emerges from the foam, its load
bituminous and black. Sparkling like dampened
slack, the hurled shards sink into piles.
There’s no story here of nature’s bounty,
no object lesson in some ineffable harmony,
no place for cosy narratives of a teleological
geology, fairy stories of indwelling purpose.
No purple passage will green the grey of days
spent hardwinning a living from the North Sea.
Listen carefully. Hear the grunt
as he bends again to plunge spade
through wave, edge half-jarring
on bed as if on broken bone then slicing
through the mix of mineral and sand.
Feeling the heft, he tenses for the hoist.
When the cart is full the horse must haul,
the wheels sinking into the soft surface.
They all grab the sides to push with freezing
hands, wet sand becoming rutted mud that clogs.
Only the smallest are spared, their chafed
fingers parting grass to flush out frogs.
Now, blasted by the cold, cheeks scalded,
they hack up gobs of phlegm, sit and stare
at the flames, like broken brother warriors
trying to forget. The fire cracks and spits
and it does not reach them: the noise
of battle, three miles off, at Ashington pit.
Glenn Hubbard has been writing poems since 2013 and his work has been published in online and paper journals such as Stand, London Grip and Tears in the Fence. He lives in Newcastle.