Photography

Looking good – Walls Muriau!

Walls:Muriau – Welsh mental health arts festival 2016

Dram rail

Remnant

Waste

Heaped

High on a mountain side

Message

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.

This afternoon on the waste strewn black scree

Of a  slag heap on the mountains high slope

I hear a plovers call in the far distance

 

I’ve come here each day for a week

Photographing the way that plants re-colonise

The barren ground of frost shattered shale.

 

Somehow a small yellow flower has emerged

Amongst the splinters of this barren mire

And life slowly returns to the black slope.

 

 

Afternoon rest

Poplars

Fluttering

Leaves

Birch trees

Jackdaws unseen

Seeing us sleeping

Soft pink wooden walls

Our small school

Clouds pass overhead

Green canvas

Stretched tight

On steel tube frames

Old grey army blankets

Brought out of storage

Smell

Dampness

There is no rush

Time passes slowly

Lying watching clouds

Sleep again

Afternoon sleep again

Time to wake up

Red leather sandals

Grey socks

Green and red belt

Snake head buckle

Pale brown shorts

White cotton shirt.

 

Childhood has changed

God knows life was never simple

Growing up in a mining valley

But now a narrowing down

Childhood brings pressure early

The need to perform

The continual auditing

To ensure achievement

Of the goals of learning

In a modern age

Ignoring the needs of a child

So very young

To grow in their own time

In their own way

To socialise

Build friendships

That narrowing down

The increase of prejudice

The re-emergence

Of pre-conceived

Convictions

Of small minded

Preference

Of a previous age

Closing down

Instead of opening

Growing

And looking out at the world

Encouraging curiosity

Of life

This earth

And all who live in it

We cannot remain silent

There is much work to do.