Breaking the past
‘I was up in Dowlais yesterday’
I said to my father.
In a blink he had a picture of wreck:
‘Not much doing there now?’
Not much doing there now…
His words slid the old screen
back onto my mind:
one shattered corner of our century,
a landscape like a warning to the future –
rust, broken neon flickering,
an oildrum floating in a pool
its rainbow slick spreading on top;
blown viaducts, dead pitwheels, more rust,
tracks choked with nettle, wind howling
through engine-sheds, chickweed in cracked
cement; slag and scrub under tamping rain,
toppled stacks and fallen Salems,
the black alps oozing filth.
All the scars of enterprise abandoned
in the silence of an armistice
through a battlefield plundered down to its gut
by scrambling ramrods. A Somme
where men looted and ran, leaving
their habitual print of indifference,
leaving
an enormous sadness.
The worn images on the screen
faded, and my father's words
with them… What the makers
of our destiny did not break
was the bonding spirit.
Community and love
still thrived on these desolate rims,
the hope never quite leaked away,
the fortitude that made them.
Green order, soft and fertile to us,
would come again, real daylight
splash the townships and fields,
horizons clear of pillage.
It was our covenant with tomorrow.
I knew I was tired
of the Past, that great
haunting - and guilty
because I was tired.
Page(s) 32-33
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