Jenny Hamlett
Cressbrook’s Children
Jenny Hamlett reading Cressbrook's Children 
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Skin of brown river, slow moving,
stabbed by raindrops into widening circles.
He wakes us before dawn, his big stick banging on the bed.
It’s up and out you heathens. Git yourselves to work. We git.
A visitors’ board is eloquent on water power,
cotton – the renovation of yellow stone.
We was bound from a London poor house for a shilling
with stories of roast beef and plum pudding.
Rain melts to mist alive with sun, the wide pool,
smoothed to a playground for swans and shellducks.
They never stop the wheel for breakfast. We eat oatcake
with one hand, must oil the machines before dinner.
Silver birches stutter above the water –
it thunders in white fire over the weir.
We’re that clemmed we steal turnips on Sundays,
one boy were beaten on the head. He weren’t the same – never.
Lost in the cave between tree and river, drowned in the weir,
their voices eddy like spent leaves.
Page(s) 45
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