Staring at the Dead

Mummy shook me from my trance,
Many years of minimal feeling.
Mummy shook me from my trance,
Her half open eyeless gaze, for days it sent me reeling,
Reliving and peeling back layer from layer,
Stories unfelt in self protection,
Stored inside my onion vault mind.
Mummy shook me from my trance
And my head begins to bloom.
Delicate petals: hurt, triumph, sadness, love and anger,
All class of colours burst in motion capture reaching for light and air
And blur into one stupifying sense of existence.
Perfect, speechless. The narrowest point of vision that cones infinitely and all encompassingly.
And dries the mouth, coats the body, invades every movement and seems like death.

I think back to those eyeless eyes as I begin to stabilise,
From total sensation back to my plateau of expected association.
Of things that must be because of where they are and what they are not,
Of cigarette butts and forget-me-nots.
Of waste and beauty and oh I could go on,
To list it all in some collage to look like life.
But I saw with my whole body in those Inca eyes.
Absorbed five hundred years without compromise.
Lips that seemed to mouth at me.
A little girl hit by lightning,
Expression preserved - a sacrifical offering,
Buried as close to sky as she could be brought,
In the claustrophobia of my existence I could not be taught,
To let a thing be, there being no other possibility.
The bird's nest of continuous alternatives imagined for every teasing moment starts to relax and unravel.
A boy that wandered into dark woods is coming home,
Unafraid to feel, friends with the butterflies,
Seeking less to justify,
Proud to spill ink and testify,
Or be a bulb uncompromised.
Safe in the certainty of seasonal flowering,
In the cold and dark the buds are ripening.

Potosi Miners

Crouched and crooked, struggling for breath.
Going down fast, further out of my depth.
"Into the mouth of hell", one chronicler put,
Under the mountain at twelve thousand foot.
Fumbling through the catacombs,
Dust encrusted nostrils cave in,
Claustrophobia threatening.
Ghosts in the rock,
The forgotten of the flock.
Unseen, underground,
Turned to stone through centuries without sound.

Choking, scrambling on all fours,
Palms cut on jagged debris.
Pause to heave air in,
A tenth of my strength.
Up again, under helmet and overhanging crunch,
Potosi miners, hard hattest of the bunch.
Pulling minerals from the mountain,
Dragging them up and out on defiant spines, through impossile passages.
Pushing the wagon: two by two, a ton along rusting rails,
Plunging coca into their mouths, all day with blackened nails.
The leaf their only alimentation,
The green teethed symbol of this vocation.

Dense heat, stooping torchlight and broken beams,
Distant chisels pick at the seams.
Silver, Zinc, Copper, Tin.
The periodically able, where do I fit in?
Square shouldered great grandad in the ground for coal,
Saviour hero when the pit fell in.
Great man they say, but neither I nor my father's him,
Potosi miners doing themselve in.
Living forty, fifty years,
The lungs pack up and succumb to the tears,
Of wives, mothers, sons and daughters,
The numbers stack up, the sum of their fears.

Inheritance, conscious inevitability:
The miner's son joins the fraternity,
Wears its gowns but seldom frowns,
Earns more than they do in the towns.
Answers to noone, commitment to collectivity,
A creed of positivity, a law of reciprocity.
Empowered, the cooperative sets its own hours,
Selects its holidays and shares what it pays.
The living mine's memory,
It wasn't always like this:
Forced labour, six months without daylight,
Now death has a sweeter kiss.
Families round the table, dining on meat and rice,
Potosi miners, brothers in proud sacrifice.