‘But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Left in the ground.’
MINERS, Wilfred Owen
Of course she would win: Snatcher Thatcher; The Iron
Lady; She of the Marilyn Monroe Hair
and the Caligula Eyes; Scourge of the Argies!
It was the conflict and the outcome of her dreams –
the opportunity to destroy
the National Union of Mineworkers,
and the Labour-voting pithead villages,
and make Britain great for greed again!
The comrades, the brothers and the sisters,
were too certain of the power of the rubric
of rule books, rhetorical abstractions
like ‘solidarity’ and ‘community’,
too sentimental, too innocent
to take note of the mounting stockpiles of coal
at the coking plants, and the lines of police
waiting with their horses in the woods.
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By David Selzer