Jean Earle
Tigg's Trot
Falling wide
Downhill: towards some place —
No place yet —
Will in time become a place
But what?
Here was, once,
Sunward-facing land about a farm
Long gone. Gone. And then
Cheap terraces clambering round
Black works, now choked in their throats.
All that demolished. Waiting.
Chill day and hidden sun.
A few lads picking trash over,
Sniffing, behind boulders.
A few men
Lurching in low gear, the rubbled paths
That lead nowhere....
You'll find this triangle
At the edge of waste. Perhaps always there,
Perhaps an ancient goat patch
Or cabbage garden
Escaped from man's crush
And deadweights. Now opened up
By steel bulls
Charging at the blackened life —
Time-life
Teeming so narrow and so loud: then silent
Under obliterating coils.
And this scarred too -but with marks of children.
Tins: a burst ball.
Still-standing ghostly game
Using brick stumps.
No sun comes out. Yet evanescent warmth
Breathes up from grass: slightly suggests
A scent of health. Tenders, toward
The sun's remoteness, its christened name.
Page(s) 49
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