Hillcrest
 
 
A coal miner’s days are numbered
by the dirt and the rocks of the earth.

As the shadow of World War I
darkened nineteen-fourteen
Canadian history would be written in coal,
as the Hillcrest mine would become
the worst mining disaster the nation has seen.

That nineteenth day of June 
the sun rose shining brightly ‘round.
Three hundred and seventy miners
reported for their shift that morn
Two hundred thirty-five went underground.

On the Alberta side of Crowsnest Pass
in a cluster of tiny coal mine towns
Hillcrest was considered the safest
and best run mine of them all
but still the walls came tumbling down.

And a coal miner’s days are numbered
by the dirt and the rocks of the earth.

At about nine-thirty that morning
the tunnels were ripped by a thunderous blast
that cracked like a cannon, with no warning,
and for One Hundred and Eighty-nine miners 
that shift would turn out to be their last.

Only forty-one miners emerged with their lives
through the storm of coal dust that filled the air
rising up from the black pit of death
in a town numbed with grief and sorrow 
with widows and fatherless children everywhere.

Charles Elick, was one of the seventeen
who had dug out of the deadly Frank Slide,
but this time, Elick’s good luck ran out,
for at Hillcrest his name was listed
among the unfortunate miners who died.

For a coal miner’s days are numbered
by the dirt and the rocks of the earth.






                  june 2003