Thank you!

Hello; sorry about this but I can’t seem to post comments this afternoon. I don’t think it’s a problem with this site Bearsy; it’s my computer since I had the same problem with MyT and hotmail yesterday.

But just to say; thanks Ferret and Jaime. There were loads of great entries which I really loved; I am genuinely and pleasantly surprised…

Ta very much for a setting such a good competition as well 🙂

So what happens now…?!

The Crucible

So, chemistry. Hardly remember any. Teacher was a short chap with specs and a hair-cut from the 1940’s who I don’t remember speaking to me once. I think he mostly bonded with boys.  Co-valent bonding, no doubt. The chemistry swots were speccie geeky chaps who averted their eyes from us girls and already liked chemistry and physics.

Although I was mad keen on biology, I made no sense of the hieroglyphics that this teacher scrawled all over the blackboard. It might as well have been ancient Egyptian.

I felt it was a knowledge gap that I should attempt to address so I got a ticket to ‘Chemistry – a Volatile History’ – a talk at the Cheltenham Science Festival. I thought it might put chemistry in perspective at last; make sense of the carboys of noxious stuff that my bonkers uncle used to keep in the kitchen cupboards at my nan’s house and mix up on her kitchen table. Continue reading “The Crucible”

A lighter underground experience

X-rays


An eerie hoard
scattered and layered,
resembling torn paper
floating in earth:

untarnished gold
sunk in sod
packed into time
imbedded like pain

What makes a treasure?

Fluttering in the dark
contours of earth,
shapes overlap on
the film’s black field

The soil sectioned
and sliced to preserve
not riches
but position:
each secret
of gold and garnet
constellated
to the others

Their stance a story

Ballad of the Buried Miners

Deep within the earth we lie
Untouched by winds of human sighs,
Cocooned in our charcoal chambers,
Safe from what killed and maimed us;
Not for us, the sunlit glade,
The musk rose scent, the dappled shade,
Instead, the stooping, hellish crawl
The caged descent; the monstrous haul;
No rubies, gold or diamonds there,
But foul and fiery, fumed filled air
And then, a blast: get out, get out!
Yellow mist; muffled shouts;
Life’s blind fury was released
To slowly make our breathing cease;
Our flesh and eyes have cracked and peeled,
Our bones now crumble, crack and yield;
We have retained our still bright souls,
Mid sulphur, slate and God of coal;
We, Britannia’s warrior slaves
Through furnace, steam and ocean, gave
Linen, cotton, things to buy
For carpets, secrets, oils and cries,
We screamed and groaned in holes unseen
To build a burnished empire’s dream.
Now three miles under earth our bones
Are Wakefield, Wigan, Sheffield, Colne.
Remember us: we built your world
With blackened lives, with teeth of pearl.