It took years of waiting to be in the right place in my own life, a subsequent visit to Big Pit last year and a trip to the moving memorial at Six Bells itself before I finally set about writing my poem.
It seemed to me that a form poem would best suit my purpose - one in which lines are repeated in a set order, to mimic the circling of thoughts that go through your head while waiting for news that could go either way, each time worse than before. I was also very aware that the news at Six Bells turned out to be as tragic as it could be, for only three of the 48 men working in the district of the mine where the explosion happened survived. This meant whatever I wrote had to be unsentimental yet empathetic, and as good as I could make it.
Eventually I wrote a pantoum and called it 'Round for Six Bells', the idea being each of the six stanzas would toll a litany of loss. Well, that was the idea, anyway, and this is what I came up with.
Round for Six Bells
Above
ground the women are waiting.
Stretchers
are piled against the wall.
All that
they know is sliding away.
Their
hands grip the railings to steady their fear.
The
stretchers are piled against the wall.
The sound
of the hooter is like a wail.
Their
hands grip the railings to steady their fear,
to keep
worry out of the shadows and small.
The sound
of the hooter will be their wail
as long as
they cling to iron and rust,
to keep
worry out of the shadows and small
like the
bacon left boiling on the stove.
As long as
they cling to iron and rust,
they won’t
imagine the flesh of the dead
like bacon
left burning on the stove,
no point
turning worrying into dread
so they
don’t imagine the flesh of the dead
their
husbands’ skin is blackened with dust
it might
not be as bad as they dread
it was
just the faintest of shudders felt
and their
sons’ skin is black, yes, but only with dust
and all
that they know is sliding away
in that
faintest of shudders felt
above
ground. The women are waiting.
© Deborah Harvey 2013, 2014
Once written, the poem lay around for a bit. I read it at Bristol Poetry Festival in the autumn of 2013 and earmarked it for inclusion in my second poetry collection, Map Reading for Beginners, which is due out this September. Then I remembered something I had read years ago: an observation Leonard Cohen had made about being duped out of the rights for 'Suzanne' and how he had once heard some people singing it on a ship on the Caspian Sea, concluding that maybe it was appropriate that such a well-loved song didn't belong just to him to make money from.
I'm not deluded enough to compare 'Round for Six Bells' with 'Suzanne' or to think that I will ever make any money out of my poetry, but I do believe that poems are like songs in that once they are take their place, however modest, in the world, they don't really belong to the poet any more. In the narrowest sense, that hopeful little © above can easily be ignored, as recent notorious acts of plagiarism have shown. But what I'm really talking about is the way they contain enough space for the listener or reader to interpret them in the light of their own emotional truths, which means that each time it is read, a poem takes on a new existence.
At any rate, I wanted to give something back to the community that inspired me so I contacted the curator at the National Coal Museum and asked whether they would display it or simply keep it in their archive. Almost immediately I had a response to the effect that they would 'frame it and hang it where people could read it'. My poem's going home.
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