Men O' the Black Seam

When we turned eleven our schooldays turned to memories. The descent into the clanking dark commenced as chalk-dust abandoned our nostrils. Reborn as the men o’ the black seam when we turned eleven. I cried myself to sleep at night, bones stiffened in pain from cramp and cold, inconsolable in fear of the hidden reaper in the clanking dark. The passage of time robbed me of my tears; icy pain, a constant companion, a nagging fishwife, ‘till death do us part, dulled down as nerve endings died; the fear of the hidden reaper, blunted, suppressed. I became a man, his childhood thieved by the cutpurse hands of industry. A man o’ the black seam. Down into the shaft with my father and friends, this desperate camaraderie of the doomed enslaved. We rode the squealing lift at the crack of dawn into hells’ colon. Wrestling nuggets of black gold from the earthen guts. Belly crawled through one foot of water in two foot high tunnels. Hacked at Satan’s visage ‘till each muscle howled, each sinew screamed. Recoiled, blind panic at the putrescent rat’s innards stench of the ghostly whiff, the merest hint of methane. Then we went home the way we came. In the dark. In harmony. Us men o’ the black seam. The saddest blackface minstrels you ever did see…