Artist
Towering about Merthyr Tydfil is “Fros y Fran” - the last open-cast coal mine in the country. It is actually part of a regeneration scheme to make the former slag heaps safe for development and to return the formerly toxic wasteland into a more natural state. To pay for that, the developers were given permission to extract the remaining 11 million tonnes of coal by the cheapest and quickest method possible.
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Whilst there is a promise of better things to come, at the moment it gives a glimpse of what the whole area would have looked like 100 years ago; black, oozing, deathly - like scene from Dante’s Inferno.
Angels of Hope
Oozing from nature’s raped and torn-out soul,
Seeps the black blood of borrowed time.
Like termites, we eat into these hills,
Hastening our terminal decline.
Where once the grass was pure, the skylark sang,
Sheep grazed and Yates’ dropping peace fell,
This lust for riches, stolen from the earth,
Has bought a glimpse of Dante’s hell.
That, which once was hewn by bleeding hands, with
Empty bellies, and early graves;
Chanceless lives enriching the few;
Is now torn out with lifeless slaves.
Their wheels like watermills’, engines that roar,
With giant mouths and steely claws -
They do in a day a human year’s work,
But nothing for the righteous cause.
Now there’s fewer men - but still as removed
From the shadowed, faceless vampires
Of greed: Nature and humanity, thrown -
Onto the capitalists’ pyres.
But as the dusk hails the end of this age,
The leeches of wealth, gone elsewhere,
Upon the horizon, spreading their wings -
Angels of hope, harvest the air.