The Afternoon Shift Are Leaving the Port Talbot Steelworks - by
The machines don’t / stop, night or day, although, one by one, / the anonymous men are slipping away.
The machines don’t / stop, night or day, although, one by one, / the anonymous men are slipping away.
Week after week I watched the darlings growing
/ Like two strange children in an orphan home,
/ Aft from the thrust block to…
He was digging, digging, digging with his little pick and spade,
/ And when the Dawn was rising it was trenches that…
I am the Esperance, I sail in your wake, / canvas unfurled, bellied with hope / as you pour into…
If I have to, then let me be the whaler poet, / launcher of the knife, portioning off / the…
for Terence Brown
/
/ Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand
/ In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers
/ Firing over the…
My only talent lay in these.
/ My father rubbed his hands together,
/ stared as though their whorls held codes
/ of thirty years obstetric…
New doctors will be empowered by poems
/ in the pockets of their metaphorical white coats.
/ There at the ready:
/ on early, sweaty,…
I ask no lovelier thing
/ Than this December silver:
/ See how the light flakes off the new-turned plough
/ Under the slow great swing
/ Of…
The power of Thought—the magic of the Mind! …
In his dark room he is finally alone
/ with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
/ The only light is red…
in memory of my grandfather
/ (after Schubert’s piano sonata in C minor D958)
/
/
/ Hammer-blows ring on a hull in dry-dock
/ then dazzling sparks…