In celebration of World Poetry Day, we’d like to share Brendan Hawthorne’s poem ‘Angling For Narrow Boats’ with you, which will be published in ‘Tipton Tales’- a book of newly commissioned poetry focusing on the Sandwell town of Tipton.
Angling For Narrow Boats
Floats bob on lazy eddies
piercing meniscal surface tension
now clear from past pollutions
and any toxins held in suspension
See the master carp weave a slalom
through the waters of a clear mainline
where Caggy’s yard repaired holed hulls
bored by the corrosive metal moths of time
We are free of the clatter and the clang
Of metal being hammered and drop forged
Yet still we hear them through the memories
of when once varied industries engorged
their way through what lay beneath
this blackened Carboniferous earth
Millennia of life that died for gain
and once spent left behind this dearth
But past glory survives in the eyes
of a people oh so proud
Grit still flows in their veins from
industry’s primal scream out loud!
We bought our music from Owen Street
Dark Side of the Moon to Planet Gong
A bed rock sequence of foundations
on which to measure our lives along
In plain view of the cooling towers
and Bolton Court’s windows in the sky
that passively saw nothing
But recorded everything passing by
The coal trucks that flicked up bricks
and slaughter wagons that held a cry
And the cranes of post industrialism
that often went rolling by
The cargo trains of a nation
over the years they came and went
Rumbled the ground beneath our feet
so many could pay their rent
And the canals gave way in time
to the benefits of road and rail
When hours were measured in pounds
and cheap labour was up for sale
And now the silence shatters a past
that built a world from the sweat on its back
No more chemical outfalls
or umbered sunrises veiled by chimney stacks
And floats still bob on lazy eddies
Waiting for a piscine attack
Large scale industry may be finished
But the boats are coming back
Listen. You can hear the shift
The boats are coming back
Brendan Hawthorne