Bitter limp fruit
Imagine fishermen labouring in a heavy seas swell
Pulling in the trawl to find a bitter limp fruit
Entwined in the mesh of drip wet green nets
The dead eyed souls of their young children
And we stay silent for our history is never told
Silenced from the hour, the days, and the years
For we are edited out of the hour of our times
Imagine coal miners hollowing out the seams
Men stripping coal a mile underground and more
And the hooters above ground calling them away
And brought up into the blinking light see the black tip
The harvest of their toils washed into the village
Spewed over the school where small children
Had read rhymes, sang hymns, were supposed to be safe
And we stay silent for our history is never told
Silenced from the hour, the days, and the years
For we are edited out of the hour of our times.
Imagine the trail of letters written foretelling
The concerns, the fears that a disaster would occur
And the NCB replies not days, not months but years later
And on a grey fog filled October day after weeks of rain
A small children’s school and a day of devastation
Exactly in the manner and the way foretold
And imagine if no one was held to account
And those families told make the slag heap safe
From the proceeds raised for the disaster fund
And we stay silent for our history is never told
Silenced from the hour, the days, and the years
For we are edited out of the hour of our times.
Imagine the miner, the father, the brother, the son
Looking out at the sprawl of waste they’d dug
Imagine the mother, the sister, the daughter
Looking out at the grey listlessness of another day
Of the silent keening, the numbed grieving
Of the impossibility of using words to describe
And we stay silent for our history is never told
Silenced from the hour, the days, and the years
For we are edited out of the hour of our times.
Imagine the mothers bringing up children
The happiness and hopes for the future
Imagine the sisters who stayed off school
Imagine the brother too slow and was late
Imagine the vacuum where a life had been
Imagine a young life where a vacuum is now
And we have been silenced, our history just words
And our future is silent and will never be told
Silenced from the hour, silenced from those days
Silenced from the years, silenced from all that might have been.
The Aberfan Tribunal found that repeated warnings about the dangerous condition of the tip had been ignored, and that colliery engineers at all levels had concentrated only on conditions underground. In one passage, the Report noted:
“We found that many witnesses … had been oblivious of what lay before their eyes. It did not enter their consciousness. They were like moles being asked about the habits of birds.”
No NCB staff were ever demoted, sacked or prosecuted as a consequence of the Aberfan disaster or of evidence given to the Inquiry.
