Literature Wales Newsletter
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The National Poet commemorates the Six Bells colliery disaster
National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke has written a new poem commemorating those who were killed in the Six Bells colliery explosion.
50 years ago, on 28 June 1960, 45 men lost their lives as a gas explosion ripped through the Six Bells colliery near Abertillery, Blaenau Gwent. A memorial to the tragedy - a 20m high sculpture of a miner by Sebastian Boyesen - will be also be unveiled today.
Six Bells
28 June 1960
Perhaps a woman hanging out the wash
paused, hearing something, a sudden hush,
a pulse inside the earth like a blow to the heart,
holding in her arms the wet weight
of her wedding sheets, his shirts. Perhaps
heads lifted from the work of scrubbing steps,
hands stilled from wringing rainbows onto slate,
while below the town, deep in the pit
a rock-fall struck a spark from steel, and fired
the void, punched through the mine a fist
of blazing firedamp. As they died,
perhaps a silence, before sirens cried,
before the people gathered in the street,
before she’d finished hanging out her sheets.
Gillian Clarke