Poem 89

Written for an Original Composition exercise in 1984 … class guest Ian Wedde wanted us to create something as the basis of a William Burroughs-style cut-up exercise but it had to be a piece of writing that meant something to us … I wrote this about my mother’s mother and it ended up in my portfolio at the end of the course … I refashioned it in 2012 to include in White Cloud the show I made with Tim Finn about our experiences of being pakeha … the onstage musicians played mutant brass band backing to evoke both the sound of industrial machinery and the music of the working class miners …

… at that time I hadn’t visited Denniston and the remnants of Burnett’s Face (though I’d seen photos) but I have now …

Burnett’s Face

I never talked to her about it
but I know my grandmother 
had a sister who died

it was when she was a girl 
living in Burnett’s Face
the mining town she was born in
in the mist above Denniston

the coalface was worked 
twenty-four hours a day
and the coal brought down a skipway 
which doubled as the town’s main street
the full skips rumbling down pulled the empty ones 
rattling back up
heard everywhere from every house
it was the sound of the town breathing
of the coal coming out of the seam
when that stopped the town died
had to move away

ten years old my grandmother 
went out one morning
                         her youngest sister followed
got onto the line and was crushed 
by a coal skip

a hundred years later
generations later
and still the story 
holds a hint of blame if only my grandmother 
had looked round

if that’s how it is now
how did she feel that morning
and for the rest of her life?

I can’t think of my grandmother 
as anything but old
and I can only imagine my dead great aunt 
as a child
they make a strange couple an old lady 
and a little girl
sisters

and Burnett's Face a dead town
a few chimneys on a hillside