A coal mining child

A coal mining child

My life is measured
By the hour I get up
My walk down the hill
To the coal pit at the bottom
The darkness of the opening
I stoop so low to enter
The crawl on hands and knees
Of hard skin and cuts
Through mud and water
To get to my father the miner
Sat naked digging at the face
To get coal to power society
In this blackest of blacks
No sunlight can penetrate
I must load chunk after chunk of coal
Onto the corve that I push
On my own, alone, back to the sunlight
And to air I can breathe
No time for rest I must carry on
Turn around and repeat this process
Till here are no more corves of coal
To push from the darkness
Sometimes it is dark before I finish
I have no food or water until I do
When I get home a quick meal
And then bed so I can repeat this
Process tomorrow
And the day after
Until I die

A corf (pl. corves) also spelt corve (pl. corves) in mining is a wicker basket or a small human powered (in later times in the case of the larger mines, horse drawn) minecart for carrying or transporting coal, ore, etc.^[1] Human powered corfs had generally been phased out by the turn of the 20th century, with horse drawn corfs having been mostly replaced by horse drawn or motorised minecarts mounted on rails by the late 1920s. Also similar is a Tram, originally a box on runners, dragged like a sledge.