#513 - I heard the coal go past me all night

29.v.21

513

2.146

I heard the coal go all night past me 

(a night in Maitland, by the line)

honouring the seven million people worldwide who die from air pollution each year

I heard the coal go past me all night 

a kind of kettle all come to the boil 

(and stood there)

like air-con rumble 

(but the light was off)

like the rise of the sea

(but that seemed so far)

roar like a vacuum cleaner

(me cornered, and the dust still setting)

like tinnitus 

(something you’d rather not hear)

like a passenger train 

but heavier because 

this was the mountain 

on its way to China

on its way to India 

on its way to Japan

(where they’re just as greedy

and foolish as we are)

I heard the coal go past me all night 

and some would call it human nature 

of course it was a dream

it was to black the sky 

so we’ve night all the time 

someone said ‘the world needs us’

and who’s to say when enough is enough?

this was only in a poem you know 

no harm done can be done in there 

I heard the coal go past all night 

like the beginning of a big storm

        stuck there

like the train wreck in slow motion 

like a fire nearby and gathering 

like a reckoning to come 

and somebody said ‘but ours is the cleanest

if we don’t then there’s worse’

in my dream 

I could hear the machines

each said to the other 

dig deeper and deep 

there’s more mountain under

we go on forever 

it’s what we do best

it’s the only thing that we do

but I dreamed the dream of blue skies 

and green things

then I could imagine everyone breathing

and everyone’s breath for a song 

song of enough lung 

and now we can sing 

it’s a song of together 

(it’s so wet!  it could almost be true)

of this is our Earth 

we’re just the one spinning 

we’re the far blue

all in the one Ark riding 

I was in the heart of the Hunter Valley

between pasture and sea

forest and the future 

all of this on the stolen land

…

and can you guess what happened next?

it was like football out of the trenches 

and no more world war one

because christmas of course 

the driver climbed down 

and the miners downed tools

they all wanted to make it a Hollywood moment 

it was merely my reverie of course 

but things are so real in the dream

I heard the coal go past me all night

but I dreamed a dream

that it stopped