Manchester Triptych

!

Floret of flame, echo of the big bang,

Flinging innocent creation apart,

Flaying thin skin from an orderly world,

Punching and pummelling breaking bodies,

Undoing flesh with nuts and bolts and screws,

Undoing families in a moment,

Undoing this cause through its own effect,

Discounting the life which this is the sum,

Discounting lives summarily totalled,

Immaculate lives blown out in a flash.

?

Who the bomber? One dressed in his best vest,

High on the opiates of his people?

Or higher, two miles high, super sonic

And scratching the sky so close to the void?

Or miles out to sea, maybe, on a cruise?

Or cruising through cyber space and zapping

Pixilated people deaf to the drone?

And who the victims? Outlines coloured in

With bold strokes broad enough to blur edges,

Such simplified figures, which children count?

$ + £…

Words are not cheap, they do cost lives, spoken

With redacted care to prick sentiments

With forked tongues, justifying calls to arms

For the hundred years and more war, all one

Global war over branding, re-branding,

Bottom lines, arrayed on banners, dressed up

In various uniforms, or civvies,

Obscured by common words, such as Great War,

Second World, Cold and Hot, Insurgency.

And then, on the home front, comes a flash point.

Dave Alton 

Underground Unaware

like the insignificant drop in an ocean

like the merest dot

like the vaguest notion

like the hint of a fleck

like the point of a pin

i am the speck

which has crept within

your long-term resident guest

silently lining your lungs

like soot darkening a chimney breast

laboured breathing will be the norm

as your respiratory system i deform

inflammation fibrosis 

cavities nodules and necrosis

will give you 

a chronic cough shortness of

breath and cyanosis

coal workers fear me as a diagnosis

why 

i am yours truly pneumoconiosis 

or

 when extracting your last breath

death

i am legion

i am everywhere

i am no germ seeking germ warfare

i am just

as 

recorded in common prayer

dust

which you inhaled 

underground unaware

so ironic so unfair

 stan duncan

The Oaks Madonna

7th May, 2017, saw the unveiling of the monument commemorating those men and boys who died in the 1866 Oaks Pit Disaster. This poem was composed for, and read at, that event.

December, the hurrier month

Towards the coming of the light,

Excited anticipation

In a match struck and the advent

Candle flame. Children counting on

Coal dusted dads able to hew

Pounds and pence enough, even as

That near Christmas candle burned blue.

Etching, hand coloured and showing

Wives gathering at the pithead

Just as the maw of the main shaft

Belches fire. They’d have known the dead

Numbered their colliers. Amidst them,

Anthracite hair hurriedly styled,

Spilling down her spine over shawled

Shoulders, a Madonna and child.

Calamity wrought and rendered,

Firstly in fibre glass, and then

Bronze, to bear so tragic a weight

Of all those lives, of all those men

And boys, whose silent names will lie

Along her monumental tongue,

An eternal lament always

On the tip, about to be sung.

 The Oaks’ Madonna realised

By artist, etcher and sculptor,

This trinity fabricating

A real vision of truth in her,

A young pitman’s wife made widow

In a moment, having to cope

Because of the child in her arms,

The child being the advent of hope.

                                                                Dave Alton