'What's mine is yours': A poem by Cameron Holleran

What's mine is yours

A mine becomes a community. A livelihood becomes a life.

Close the mine. End the life.

This country knows the sting of stopping mining. 

Its men left hollow, how that hollowness spread. It cannot happen here.

These communities must survive.

All the families who warm us,

Generations of sweat and blood,

Of long nights bathing off the dirt,

Of dying in collapdes, of collapses decades later.

Mines stop as coal's no longer needed.

Once thought as gold, not is is Hell

Dredged up, taken from Satan's hands,

Poisoning, realising his kingdom on eath.

Britain's scars could be realised

As Heaven somewhere else. Fifty years

From now, miners cough thick phlegm into delicately

Patterned handkerchiefs. In-between full-bodied

Hacks, they hear children's easy breaths