A Heritage

A heritage of a sort. A heritage of comradeship and suffocation. The bawling pit-hooter and the god’s explosive foray, vengeance, before retreating to his throne of sulphur. Now this black-robed god of fossils and funerals, petrifier of underground forests and flowers, emerges with his grim retinue past a pony’s skeleton, past human skulls, into his half-propped up, empty, carbon colony. Above, on the brutalised, unstitched side of a Welsh mountain, it has to be someone from somewhere else who will sing solo not of the marasmus of the Valleys, the pit-wheels that do not turn, the pump-house abandoned; nor of how, after a half-mile fall regiments of miners’ lamps no longer, midge-like, rise and slip and bob. Only someone uncommitted, someone from somewhere else, panorama-high on a coal-tip, may jubilantly laud the re-entry of the exiled god into his shadowless kingdom. He, drunk with methane, raising a man’s femur like a sceptre; she, his ravished queen, admiring the blood-stained black roses that could not thrive on the plains of Enna.