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Lloyd Fletcher

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Botallack

We’re charmed by postcard ocean blue,
the purple-heathered cliffs,
black and yellow gorse trembling
in a warming breeze, the impossible
architecture of dead men,
gray outposts against the sea.

How did the miner care for this?
Ragged suff tearing against granite,
with a thousand feet to climb beneath
the wind-assaulted shore, to struggle
hand to filthy hand with slippery beasts
of water and rock, capricious imps

of black powder, and the monstrous outbursts
of engines? What was scenic then?
when spires of the church of industry
spewed sulphur in the wind, and the roar
of the deadly boilers played duet
with the rattle of the stamps;

arsenic works separating chemicals
in catacombs of stone; the blank ponds
like spills of weeping from the wounded edges
of the moor, the heaps of plundered rubble
lingering for a century of grass
to cover up its shame; and above all,

the beams dipping their massive oiled heads
in squall-anointed prayer for those who trod
the rotten ladder road, piercing the black layers
of our past to hammer a mean life,
beat a grim passage across their wasteland,
all the while keeping one wary eye
on the violent scenery.

 

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