Crescent Diggers

By Roy Morgan

East across the mangled moonscape land
From Trefil to Chartist's summit stand
Tramps the dogged digger gang,
Drawn to the magnet Crescent arc,
To seek the radiant splendours of the dark.

Seeking subways sculpted, shaped, began,
Long before the rise of man, the clan
Leaves the thousand cratered land
To light of day, and to the larks -
And into an eternal night embarks.

For the midnight avenues that span
Where once a leviathan river ran,
Quests the daring digger band,
Wooed 'neath the siren dark-fall arch -
Dark ways, and unseen loveliness to chart.

These of bloodied head and broken hand,
Darers of the dark-fall Crescent span -
Raiders of the Rubicon;
Blood brothers in sweat-blood founded
Digger brotherhood by darkness bounded.

Bidden to a hidden inner land,
By cooling cooing zephyrs fanned -
The burning Brynmawr firebrands,
Deep 'neath the temptress Crescent arc
Possessed! - in an ink black aphrodisiac.

To track the tumbling torrent falls
By boulder walls, sumps and serpent crawls -
To Rhiannons stygian halls;
Far thrusting through that inner bourne,
Terrier travellers of the hollow stone.

Desire steeled in Darkfire naught withstands,
Down and down through rubble, rock and sand,
Plunge the valiant veterans -
With hammer, pick and blitzing spark
To win Llangynidr's deep secret heart.