By Miners Hands
What miner’s art
Did meld and make,
Did stone on stone
Fling you on high,
Or lie beneath
The stars, awake
To think your shape
As nights sped by?
What weary hand
Did knead and tread
Your mud in some
Dead winter’s storm,
While autumn’s bride
Long kept her bed
To wait his will
Who gave you form.
And though they lie
Unknown at last,
Without foundation
Still you stand,
Your walls have stood
Six score of years
While they ran through
Their shift of sand!
And every furrow
At some brow
Did trace in mud
These barren lands,
Each humble cottage
Built in need
Was raised in pride
By miner’s hands!
18 February 1983
poem by David Lewis Paget
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Related quotes
Walls
Walls of stone and walls of brick,
Some walls thin and some walls thick,
Walls so high and walls so low,
Walls to hide and walls to show.
Walls quite short and walls quite tall,
Some walls, last well, some walls fall,
Walls for comfort, walls of hate,
Walls for security, walls ornate.
Some as a barricade, some to support,
Walls of wood and walls of iron wrought,
Walls as a barrier, walls to enclose,
Some are to sit on, some to lean and doze.
Walls we build ourselves, these aren't good,
Walls for privacy, walls that have stood,
So many years through weather foul or fine,
Walls, that are yours, walls that are mine.
Brick by brick they are built to last,
Whether built now or in the past,
They shelter us from so many things,
And shield us from whatever this life brings.
poem by Ernestine Northover
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Homecoming
Grandfather built, with his own hands
The house we children called our home.
A fine expanse of stone and brick,
a castle that was ours alone.
That was before the threatening storm
turned us into refugees
The howling wind, the battering surge
Let loose the Ocean's enmity.
Of our fine home scant trace remains:
Some stone and the foundation walls
Keepsakes and memories long displayed
Sadly we have lost them all.
No loss of life, no death to weep
But still a sense of loss pervades.
The certainty of Youth is gone
And fallen trees can give no shade.
We'll build again with our own hands
The house our children will call home.
I think, perhaps, on higher ground,
Where Ocean waves do seldom roam
There we will make new memories
Those things we lost will matter not.
We have each other, that is enough.
We'll build our heaven on this spot.
poem by John F. McCullagh
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I Am (Defiant)
i am, become...
i am the seat on the bus
Rosa Parks would not leave..
i am the fires of anger
when Martin Luther King was killed.
i am the grassy knoll,
where the true killer stood.
i am the Little Bighorn,
and Crazy Horse weeping...
i am the men that built the bombs,
and all the faceless souls screaming
through their long sleepless nights...
i am the brothers that killed each other
in the long Civil War...
i am the slaves set free,
i am the Native Americans sent
to live in poverty on reservations
in the name of a white god...
i am the farm worker exploited,
the coal miner who died...
i am the rats and the filth
of tenements and trailers...
i am the blues hand picked,
moonshine made in the hills...
i am the grandfather who built
his house with his own hands.
i am the rage of the common,
i am America defiant,
i am, become....
poem by Eric Cockrell
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Desert sands
Invisible, amidst grains of sand;
blinding heat beads sweat that rivers run
from furrowed brow to hollow hands
that wipe along the sting that lands
on skin stretched beneath blazing sun.
Each and every way the warm wind blows
shards of glass swirl into heaving mounds
that shift and change the way to go.
A moving sea that dips and throws
unsteady feet on to drifting ground.
How is direction to be embraced,
when all that can be seen is endless,
desert marked by displacing face.
Where travelled footprints leave no trace
and all around barren emptiness.
poem by Diana Rosser
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February Stars
I'm hanging on
Here until I'm gone
I'm right where I belong
Just hanging on
Even though
I watched you come and go
How was I to know
You'd steal the show?
One day I'll have enough to gamble
I'll wait to hear your final call
And bet it all
I'm hanging on
Here until I'm gone
I'm right where I belong
Just hanging on
Even though
I pass this time alone
Somewhere so unknown
It heals the soul
You ask for walls
I'll build them higher
We'll lie in shadows of them all
I'd stand but they're much too tall
And I fall
CHORUS
February stars
Floating in the dark
Temporary scars
February stars
REPEAT CHORUS (2X)
song performed by by Foo Fighters from The Colour And The Shape
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Ghosts
I to a crumpled cabin came
upon a hillside high,
And with me was a withered dame
As weariful as I.
"It used to be our home," she said;
"How well I remember well!
Oh that our happy hearth should be
Today an empty shell!"
The door was flailing in the storm
That deafed us with its din;
The roof that kept us once so warm
Now let the snow-drift in.
The floor sagged to the sod below,
The walls caved crazily;
We only heard the wind of woe
Where once was glow and glee.
So there we stood disconsolate
Beneath the Midnight Dome,
And ancient miner and his mate,
Before our wedded home,
Where we had know such love and cheer . . .
I sighed, then soft she said:
"Do not regret - remember, dear,
We, too, are dead."
poem by Robert William Service
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And The Rains Descended And The Floods Came
NOW the far waves roll nearer and more near,
The wind's awake, the pitiless wind's awake,
It shrieks the menace that I dare not hear,
Soon at my feet the angry waves will break
In desolating wrath--and here I stand
Helpless my house is built upon the sand.
O you, whose house upon a rock is set,
Laugh, safe and sure, at threatening wave and wind.
You chose the better part and yet--and yet,
There was no other ground that I could find,
And I was weary and I longed to raise
A house to guard my shivering nights and days.
And it was pleasant in the house I made,
While still the floods and winds were held asleep.
I blessed it at the dawn, at night I prayed
As though its dear foundations had been deep
Sunk in the rock. I whispered in surmise,
'What if winds never wake, floods never rise?'
And now the waves are near and very near,
And here I wait and wonder which may be
The wave in which my house will disappear,
My little house that loved and sheltered me,
Where joy still sings, her garland in her hand,
Built on the sand, oh God, built on the sand!
poem by Edith Nesbit
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Lonely In Your Nightmare
Even on the darkest night when empty promise means empty hand
And soldiers coming home like shadows turning red
When the lights of hope are fading quickly then look to me
Ill be your homing angel,Ill be in your head.
Because youre lonely in your nightmare let me in...
And theres heat beneath your winter let me in...
I see the delta traces living lonely out on the limb.
And a passing glimmer warm beneath your skin
Please tread gently on the ground when all around you earth
Turns to fire
Only get a second chance when dangers on the wind.
Because youre lonely in your nightmare let me in...
Because theres heat beneath your winter let me in...
-
Must be lucky weather when you find the kind of wind that you need
Cmon show me all the light and shade that made your name
I know youve got it in your head, Ive seen that look before
Youve built your refuge turns you captive all the same
Because youre lonely in your nightmare let me in...
And its barren in your garden let me in...
Because theres heat beneath your winter let me in..
Because youre so lonely in your nightmare let me in..
And its cold out on your stone range let me in...
Because theres heat beneath your winter let me in...
Do, do-do, do do do do
Do, do-do, do do do do
song performed by by Duran Duran
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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What She Said
She said: Would I might sleep
With the bulbs I plant so deep,
Forgetting all the long Winter
That I must awake and weep.
A dreamless sleepy-head,
Forgetting my Dear was dead;
Nothing caring nor knowing
While the dark season sped.
I am so young, so young,
And the years stretch out so long,
The weeks and the months so endless;
The long life does me wrong.
I would grow old and grey,
As though 'twere only a day,
Till his voice came calling, calling
To me under the clay.
Then I should spring to the sun,
Life done with, Life begun,
And run where he waited to lift me
Over the threshold stone.
She sighed in the Autumn weather: --
Would I and the bulbs together,
For Spring lay quietly waiting;
I and the bulbs together.
poem by Katharine Tynan
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Coronach
(words and music by david palmer)
Grey the mist --- cold the dawn;
Cruel the sea and stern the shore.
Brave the man who sets his course
For albion.
Sweet the rose --- sharp the thorn;
Meek the soil and proud the corn.
Blessed the lamb that would be born
Within this green and pleasant land.
Hi-o-ran-i-o
Hi-o-ran-i-o
Brown furrow shine
Beneath the rain washed blue.
Bright crystal streams
From eagle mountains born.
Fortune has smiled on those who wake anew,
Within this fortress nature built
To stay the hand of war.
With the wind from the east
Came the first of those who tread
Upon this stone, this stone of kings;
This realm, this new jerusalem.
Hi-o-ran-i-o
Hi-o-ran-i-o
song performed by by Jethro Tull
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The Silence Of Stone (revised)
take a stone,
from the beginning it was
a stone in form
and color and smell
and stone to stone
it shall be stone
unless you take it
in your hand
and keep it warm
in the hold of your palm
and take it home with you
you talk to it
and then it becomes
beyond itself
now
it is not just a stone
but your beloved
your lover
you will discover
that its silence also speaks
in tongues
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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Existence First, Then Essence
take a stone,
from the beginning it was
a stone in form
and color and smell
and stone to stone
it shall be stone
unless you take it
in your hand
and keep it warm
in the hold of your palm
and take it home with you
you talk to it
and then it becomes
beyond itself
now
it is not just a stone
but your beloved
your lover
you will discover
that its silence also speaks
in tongues
poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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A Savage
DIXON, a Choctaw, twenty years of age,
Had killed a miner in a Leadville brawl;
Tried and condemned, the rough-beards curb their rage,
And watch him stride in freedom from the hall.
'Return on Friday, to be shot to death!'
So ran the sentence—it was Monday night.
The dead man's comrades drew a well-pleased breath;
Then all night long the gambling dens were bright.
The days sped slowly; but the Friday came,
And flocked the miners to the shooting-ground;
They chose six riflemen of deadly aim,
And with low voices sat and lounged around.
'He will not come.' 'He's not a fool.' 'The men
Who set the savage free must face the blame.'
A Choctaw brave smiled bitterly, and then
Smiled proudly, with raised head, as Dixon came.
Silent and stern—a woman at his heels;
He motions to the brave, who stays her tread.
Next minute—flame the guns: the woman reels
And drops without a moan—Dixon is dead.
poem by John Boyle O'Reilly
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Loitering with a Vacant Eye
Loitering with a vacant eye
Along the Grecian gallery,
And brooding on my heavy ill,
I met a statue standing still.
Still in marble stone stood he,
And stedfastly he looked at me.
"Well met," I thought the look would say,
"We both were fashioned far away;
We neither knew, when we were young,
These Londoners we live among."
Still he stood and eyed me hard,
An earnest and a grave regard:
"What, lad, drooping with your lot?
I too would be where I am not.
I too survey that endless line
Of men whose thoughts are not as mine.
Years, ere you stood up from rest,
On my neck the collar prest;
Years, when you lay down your ill,
I shall stand and bear it still.
Courage, lad, 'tis not for long:
Stand, quit you like stone, be strong."
So I thought his look would say;
And light on me my trouble lay,
And I stept out in flesh and bone
Manful like the man of stone.
poem by Alfred Edward Housman
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Rock, Stone, Sand, Wind, Time, Eternity
the sculptor,
called to the great task; through
the huge columns, ringing echoes even with a sandal’s tread,
the stone chamber,
the assembled court, gold, enamelled blue,
eyes everywhere, walls, men,
the Pharoah’s presence:
‘show me as I am:
man as lion,
king of the living and the dead;
show me as eternity’
the frail old man in heavy robes,
the courtiers nodding, smirking…
more men than men could count
whipped to task under a burning noonday sun;
behind, a half-built pyramid;
slaves chipped away the ancient bedrock
according to the careful measurements,
blocking out the figure, until the day
the sculptor himself – and older now –
mounts the scaffold to begin chipping
the face of time that meets eternity.
‘time says nothing but I told you so’;
which Pharaoh died before his monument?
five thousand years before our own stone dreams,
how many years of scaffolding?
a temple hollowing between its long, long paws.
was it looked upon with awe, or
as meaningless to children,
to their children’s children,
as the frozen gesturing bronzes of our public squares? they,
running off around the back of it
to clamber onto its stone tail?
the night wind already piling up the drifting sand,
night wind in palm leaves whispering of metaphor,
green shores lost under dunes of time;
wind and sand sculpting their own unanswered question:
what is the reason we should ask of time?
what is the question whose answer is timelessness?
poem by Michael Shepherd
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Pengellen
Each winter the grey-greying streets of Pengellen
Fall silent as dampness creeps in at the hearth,
And miners and men speak in whispers of heaven,
Of darkness and penance, of copper and dearth.
No children are seen on the streets of Pengellen,
Each wife fears her shadow, and hurries inside,
While mirrors have long been discarded, forgotten
That no man may see what his God may decide.
For so it was once that the men of Pengellen
Were busy and purposeful, masters of time,
The wealth that they won taught that greed was forgiven
Though every man feared, and was ruled by the mine.
For deep in the earth with a pick or a chisel,
A shovel, an oath in a gaelic discourse,
They quarried the bowels of some God-awful midden
To pile the green copper in place of the gorse.
So pitted the surface from shaft to Pengellen,
So pitted and scorched that no flower would grow,
And brown was the landscape, and scarred was the bracken
That burst from the copper-green dirt down below.
While every stone cottage gleamed white in Pengellen
To mock at the bracken that patently lied,
For every small child played as happy as heaven
As if they believed they had God on their side.
The copper ran deeper than deep flowing runnels,
The miners would blast, and then pump and shore up,
‘Til some had remarked, ‘were the heavens so tunnelled
The mine would arrive with the first taken up.’
And higher and high were the skimps by Pengellen
‘Like mountains by men’ was the miner’s assent,
Their pride went in hand with their wealth and their women,
And Godless and grim was the worship they spent.
They drilled to the sixty and six hundredth level,
With six levels more to blast out, pump and shore,
No man could have known that the deeper he tunnels,
The darker the horror he finds at his door.
They ranged at the back as the copper was falling,
Stood silent in shock at some evil refrain,
As into the light groped the Prince of the Morning
From where he’d been cast in his thousand year chain.
The miners streamed back to the streets of Pengellen,
They crowded the Kirk that had never been filled,
And prayed to the Lord they had always forsaken,
Then went to their cottages, locked themselves in.
While stamping and raging the length of Pengellen
He called for an anvil to shatter his chain,
The mist and ill wind that had told of his coming
Were never to lift from Pengellen again.
These sixty long years have brought change to Pengellen
No child has grown old and no miner has died,
They fast on a bread that is flat and unleavened,
And drink brackish water for penance beside.
The cottages now are both damp and rat-ridden,
Are grey and neglected, and empty of cheer,
And deep-dense the mist that encloses the midden
Pengellen is lost for the best of each year.
While whispered at evens are long supplications
White-faced behind windows both bolted and barred,
And dearth is a thousand years waiting to happen,
While green is a colour considered ill starr’d.
29 February 1984
poem by David Lewis Paget
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The Book of Van den Braak
I stared at the book on the table
Where it lay on the weathered oak,
The cover so black and tarnished,
Tanned in leather through coils of smoke,
Its ancient layers had long been carved
As petals of some grim flower,
Where an evil mildew spread its mould
From the walls of that ancient tower.
The book was set like an altar piece
In that ancient, flagstoned hall,
Catching the feeble rays of light
Through cracks in the old stone wall,
I hastened to look away, but yet
It gripped me in its glare,
Like some old German Grimoire...
Though no title page was there!
I reached for the cover and opened it,
The leather creaked with age,
As it formed with its rotting petals
Into a rose around the page,
The smell of the mildew wafted up
And the chill was damp and stark,
There was nothing but evil in that tower,
In the book of Van den Braak.
I leant right over the book and saw
A woodcut of a lane,
The trees were grim in their winter coats
As the snow gave way to rain,
The mud was thick on the barren leaves
That were mulched from the Autumn's fall,
And I felt it squelch right under my feet
As the wind howled round the hall!
The tower was gone, I stood outside
In the rain and the brooding dark,
Walking along a windswept lane
In the book of Van den Braak,
I saw the light of a cottage there,
Set back in among the trees,
And a woman wailed on the painted step,
My own, my dear Louise!
I ran towards her, through a stream
That babbled beside the lane,
Louise was crying and wailing there,
She muttered: 'I'm not to blame! '
I must have seemed like a phantom there,
I waved, but she couldn't see,
She said, 'you shouldn't have killed him,
I just asked you to set me free! '
A man ran out from the cottage door,
His coat was covered in blood,
He ran his hands through his tangled hair
And fell, to kneel in the mud.
He took her into his arms and cried,
She clung, and called him Mark,
And then when he turned, I saw his face,
I knew him - Van den Braak!
I must have been quite invisible
In the pages of that book,
Or they were a couple of phantoms
Making love as I stood and shook,
I walked around to the cottage door
And peered in out of the rain,
I lay stone dead on the hearthstone there,
A bullet lodged in my brain.
In shock I turned, I saw the tower,
I ran with all my might,
Back to the Norman Keep and Moat,
Back through the surly night,
The eyes of demons had followed me
From high in the trees of the park,
But I was ready for come-what-may
At the hands of Van den Braak!
Then suddenly, I was in the tower,
Leaning over the book,
When Van den Braak called out that he
Was ready to take a look,
I'd brought the book with the tenants' rents
Of those that lived in the park,
But I stabbed him high in the rib cage there,
And cut his throat in the dark!
I went to his German Grimoire
Fell once more through the open page,
Went looking for my Louise, by now
In the white hot throes of rage,
She sat and wailed on the painted step
And muttered there in the dark...
'I didn't ask you to kill the man,
Just free me from Van den Braak! '
1 April 2010
poem by David Lewis Paget
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A Stone Griffin
a stone griffin
stern of heart
untouched
by exultant love
sits upon high
sits upon eves
in stone judgment
in heart of stone
face carved
in stone
emotionless
heartless
looking down
all passes
beneath sight
beneath grasp
look up
bodies inflamed
with emotions
passionate
we might miss
the light,
shining forth
from stars,
if we
do not,
raise
our heads,
to greater
expectations
emboldened
stellar blaze
poem by Terence George Craddock
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What The Stone Said
This stone: scraps of wet earth
still clinging to it;
rounded, greyish; large enough
to fit into my palm as if,
cradled there, it’s enough part of me
to tell me that it’s more than
inert matter without consciousness..
its pleasing roundness – warming
in my hand – tells me a little
of its history:
once it was one of many, jostled
over years or centuries in
a river or an ocean bed;
to be thrown up, again and again,
from the maw of breaking, angry wave
onto a beach; then at some high tide,
pulled back again;
it’s covered with its history:
a mass of scratches where a fiercer sand
from the hierarchy of stone’s hardnesses,
scratched it; to be soothed and smoothed
by its fellow sufferers on the watered bed.
Warm in my cradling palm, it shares
or so it seems, my own consciousness:
the same consciousness as all Creation’s wonders,
but here in supreme, uncomplaining,
inexpressive, yielding pure obedience:
a sermon in a stone; awaiting future call
to be raised up a man..
no wonder - as all children know –
‘beach’ (and can’t you hear there,
tread of feet on hard, resistant, partially
yielding stones?)
and ‘shore’ (and can’t you hear there
the waves smoothe the sand,
then draw back to crash again
like a drawn breath of astonishment?
- as children know: beach and shore
full of their shared consciousness;
God’s playground which he shares with them.
That was what the stone said.
poem by Michael Shepherd
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The Blind Caravan
1 I am a slave, both dumb and blind,
2 Upon a journey dread;
3 The iron hills lie far behind,
4 The seas of mist ahead.
5 Amid a mighty caravan
6 I toil a sombre track,
7 The strangest road since time began,
8 Where no foot turneth back.
9 Here rosy youth at morning's prime
10 And weary man at noon
11 Are crooked shapes at eventime
12 Beneath the haggard moon.
13 Faint elfin songs from out the past
14 Of some lost sunset land
15 Haunt this grim pageant drifting, vast,
16 Across the trackless sand.
17 And often for some nightward wind
18 We stay a space and hark,
19 Then leave the sunset lands behind,
20 And plunge into the dark.
21 Somewhere, somewhere, far on in front,
22 There strides a lonely man
23 Who is all strength, who bears the brunt,
24 The battle and the ban.
25 I know not of his face or form,
26 His voice or battle-scars,
27 Or how he fronts the haunted storm
28 Beneath the wintry stars;
29 I know not of his wisdom great
30 That leads this sightless host
31 Beyond the barren hills of fate
32 Unto some kindlier coast.
33 But often 'mid the eerie black
34 Through this sad caravan
35 A strange, sweet thrill is whispered back,
36 Borne on from man to man.
37 A strange, glad joy that fills the night
38 Like some far marriage horn,
39 Till every heart is filled with light
40 Of some belated morn.
41 The way is long, and rough the road,
42 And bitter the night, and dread,
43 And each poor slave is but a goad
44 To lash the one ahead.
45 Evil the foes that lie in wait
46 To slay us in the pass,
47 Bloody the slaughter at the gate,
48 And bleak the wild morass;
49 And I am but a shriveled thing
50 Beneath the midnight sky;
51 A wasted, wan remembering
52 Of days long wandered by.
53 And yet I lift my sightless face
54 Toward the eerie light,
55 And tread the lonely way we trace
56 Across the haunted night.
poem by William Wilfred Campbell
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