Bings, or slagheaps, used to dot Scotland’s Central Belt. Who would have thought they could be the stuff of poetry? But here Stanley Roger Green and George Macbeth prove that they are. (From A Book of Scottish Verse, edited by Maurice Lindsay, Robert Hale, 2001.)
THE OLD BING
A century ago deep dripping galleries were gutted
To build this monument above the wooded carse;
Now the bing is overwhelmed by dog-rose and bramble,
Veins of wild strawberry throb under bracken.
~
In winter keen hill winds and valley rains
Strip it bear revealing a gaunt memorial;
Stark in its grandeur the bing rears from the carse
Like the tumulus of a long-dead jarl or thane.
~
At its base a slow river ambles reflecting tall
Hills and still herons heraldic in twilight;
Not even the sighs of evening winds can recall
The anguished grunts of those nameless toilers,
~
Who hacked a sparse living from grudging seams,
Cursed at roof-falls, mourned lost comrades,
Indifferent as moles to the cenotaph above them
Each day darkly rising, shouldering the sun.
SHOTTS
Grown-over slag heaps rise like burial mounds
For giant moles: the outworks of a siege
Where coal that ruled their lives fell back and failed.
~
Subsidence, unturned wheels. Fresh conifers
In tiny forests mark the perished seams
And ragwort flares above blown galleries.
~
Where shafts go down, there must lie bones of men
And dregs of anthracite, once linked by work
As at the brink of something, luck or change.
~
I see my father, measuring his hat
Against my little skull, day after day
Go down those shafts and frame a better future.
~
I was born here. Now, after sixty years,
I come back weaker to the place of launching
And drive through dirty streets, tears in my eyes.
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