Who'd Have Thought It?

A response to a response to the Charlottesville incident

Nigel cannot believe that he sees
(his shock and wonder absolute)
flags of slavery dancing in the breeze
a white man's defiant jackboot salute

In the land of the free, the fascists rise
Thoughts translated into deeds
So, Nigel, why are you surprised?
Who'd have thought it? Who indeed. 

Tim Fellows 2017

The Photograph

There are two versions of this poem - the draft (at the bottom) has been around a while and then I rewrote it after a workshop in Derby with Jamie Thrasivoulou where he asked us to take a poem and alter it in style, use different words and even maybe in meaning.

I'm not sure which I prefer so I've put both of them here.

Diseases of the lung continue to affect ex-miners to this day and of course are still a major problem in the remaining mines around the world.

The Photograph

The man she looked at in the frame
Looked back, half-smiling on that day
Dressed up in his best suit and tie
with his new bride, perhaps a little coy,
They seemed so very far away

So many years spent down that hole
Grafting for their daily bread
Out of the local school on Friday
Descending in the cage on Monday
An ale or two his reward (he said)

Loose forward for the village team
No opponent gave him fear
The bigger they came, the harder he hit
Didn't want paying, preferred the pit
And liked to share a post-match beer

The child, when it came, was a boy
Looked exactly like his dad
"He's not doin' what I did,
he's got your brains, not mine!"
And he was right, he had.

Little David never went below
He was sensitive, smart and shy
The miner was proud when he saw his lad
But he never let him see his dad
With a salty tear in his rheumy eye

The last strike came as a bitter blow
It was brutal, it was hard
He stuck it out a full year and more
He watched his village split to the core
But he never betrayed his Union card

One day she said "You OK love?
You're struggling with that cough;
You don't seem right to me at all."
He grunted back "I''ll be raight,
Better weather'll see it off "

But it wasn't right, not at all
Those tiny specks of colliery dust
Had seeped into his inner soul
Had shrunk the big man down in size
His body and his spirit crushed

His hand and hers as he passed away
Clasped together with unspoken love
She only saw it in his eyes
As they closed for that final time
She hoped that they'd meet again above

His work was what had defined him
The colliery was part of his life
But it took it from her cruelly short
The damn photograph was no comfort;
it was just a young man and his wife.

The Photograph (draft)

She gazed at the photograph;
in the frame, in her hands
A young man and his wife;
smiling, barely recognisable
in their post-war Sunday best

A strong man who worked at the face
for so many years,
straight from school, 
to feed his wife and son
and to have the odd beer (or six)

He loved his rugby
he could have been a pro
they said he preferred the village team;
hard as nails and liked a scrap
then shook hands in the bar

"No son of mine" he'd said
"Is goin' down that pit"
And he didn't
he went down to Oxford
A rare tear glimpsed in the collier's eye
at his boy's ceremony

First out and last back in '84
when times were hard
they fought and defied
they stuck it out to the bitter end
Aye, the bitter end.

Then came the cough
the lack of breath
She could hear him wheezing
in the night
While she lay awake

It wasn't quick, it wasn't nice
the rugged man brought to his knees
his skin almost translucent at the end
her eyes wet and his closed
as they held each others' hands

Coal gave him pride
Its dust took it away
As time ticks by she feels
the wrenching void as she recalls
the man in the photograph

Darkness Falls in London

Darkness Falls in London

Shimmering, bright, full of life
Our bustling, noisy, cosmopolitan hub
The jewel in England's shining crown

As night descends so rises the light
The mighty towers of the Docklands
disgorge their worker bees into the dusk

Emptied, they point at the stars
extinguished by the flickering lights
of Covent Garden and the West End
that attract the hedonistic and curious.

Ant-like, they criss-cross the bridges;
Those sparkling guardians of passing boats
Bright too with revellers

Further west the night shrouds
a blackened tower, its skull-eyes
piercing us, accusing;
holding within those lost souls.
Waiting for the dawn
to haunt our thoughts again


(c) Tim Fellows 2017

The Little Tear

Theresa shed a little tear

When she realized she'd not won

We played the world's tiniest violin

and peeled a minuscule onion

I shed more than a tiny tear

for the homeless and the poor

for my European brothers

who'll soon be shown the door

For the doctors, nurses, NHS

I cried 'til no tears came

But Murdoch will be laughing

as the foreigners take the blame

As HS2 tears through our land

As we let the market rip

I'm now so dehydrated

I should be on a drip

So when you play at politics

And it doesn't quite come off

Remember the people recognise

whose snout is in the trough

(c) Tim Fellows 2017

Sonnets in remembrance of mining

As part of the Poetry Business workshop on May 27th 2017 we were set the task of writing a sonnet - the subject was that of burying an old life and starting afresh.

The link to one of my themes - the end of mining - was obvious but I decided to start with something else and work towards it. I ended up with 3 sonnets, the final one being the one that addressed the challenge. Only 151 more to go to catch up with old Shakey.

At the bottom of the page is a description of what constitutes a sonnet - at least an English, or Shakesperean one.

Miner's Sonnet #1

The cage door slams and down the shaft we fall
The rope that holds our lives the first set trap
Of many heartless ways that death may call
To transport us in its eternal wrap 

The roof that hangs low o'er my lamp-lit head
May just decide to slip and down-ward drop
The work's too hard for me to dwell on dread
That comes from cracking sounds of failing prop

We hew and hack the black and shining seam
As with no warning firedamp slyly creeps
One fatal spark will light the gassy stream
A man is gone, his lonely widow weeps

Though peril tracks the collier's daily grind
We are within its thrall of pay entwined


Miner's Sonnet #2

With comrades brave to work each day I'd go
Joking as back and forth the wit and craic
We'd scarce be fear'd or cowed or weakness show
We knew our brothers always had our back

Communities were built on mines and coal
One whole and nourished, fed by that dark pit
The bond we had held tight within our soul
Strong as atoms no government could split

With pride we marched together as one kin
In war the ranks of blue against us stood
Knowing that should we either lose or win
We'd pay for our revolt in flesh and blood

Yet danger lurked and lives were harsh and tough
The death of coal did come not soon enough

Miner's Sonnet #3

The strike is lost; so back to work we go
The fire has gone; the will to fight is slain
The comradeship continues down below
But things will never be the same again 

There's coal down there and they all know the price
But no-one counts the cost of human pain
No jobs, no hope, a village slowly dies 
Our leaders arrogant in their disdain

A collier's spirit I will surely find
At school I failed; or was it failing me
I'll not allow despair to rule my mind
Can I learn a new trade at fifty-three?

Leave behind the only life I've ever known
My future I must plan and I must own

(c) Tim Fellows 2017

Sonnets

The Shakespearean, or English , sonnet has three quatrains (4 liners) and a couplet (2 liner) which follow the rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The couplet plays a key role, ideally forming a conclusion, confirmation, or even the opposite of the previous three verses. In Shakespeare's sonnet #130, the quatrains compare the mistress unfavourably with natural beauty. However the couplet refutes all that went before as the writer declares his love.

     My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
     Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
     If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
     If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
     I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
     But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
     And in some perfumes is there more delight
     Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
     I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
     That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
     I grant I never saw a goddess go;
     My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.

Sonnets also use iambic pentameter - here's a quick explanation from Wikipedia

An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:

da DUM

The da-DUM of a human heartbeat is the most common example of this rhythm.

A standard line of iambic pentameter is five iambic feet in a row:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM

Straightforward examples of this rhythm can be heard in the opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet #12:

When I do count the clock that tells the time

and in John Keats' To Autumn

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

 

Markham 1973

Markham 1973

Photo courtesy of dun.can on Flickr, taken in 1993

My poem is dedicated to the men who died and were seriously injured in the disaster at Markham Colliery in Derbyshire on July 30th 1973. They included Joseph (Joe) Birkin, who lived in our village and whose twin daughters Lynn and Sadie were regulars at our chapel and were only 21 when their dad died.

All was quiet in the village
It was an English summer's day
Not hot, not cold, might rain, might not
Children at their play

The six week holidays had come
No teachers to obey
Free to roam the streets and fields
On that English summer's day

The rain had freshened all the scents
Flowers, grass and soil
But underneath the land so green
Men were at their toil

As the birds sang in the dawn
A braking rod gave way
Twenty nine colliers dropped down the shaft
On that English summer's day

No larks were singing in that mine
No nightingale nor jay
Just screams and blood and death and fear
On that English summer's day

The breeze was wafting wheat and grass
Last chance to cut the hay
Eighteen brave men went in that pit
And never came away

Forty years and more have passed
It seems like yesterday
When families' lives were torn apart
On that English summer's day


The inquiry, at which my dad was a witness as part of the investigating team, produced its report that lays out the details of the incident and its cause in cold, legal and exact language. Of course, this is to be expected but nonetheless it makes interesting reading for an engineer. As always in disasters, it seems, there were mistakes that could have prevented or mitigated against the terrible injuries and deaths that resulted from the fatigue failure of a metal braking rod. As it turns out, almost my entire working life had been spent with a company whose core products and skills are based on software that helps to predict and prevent fatigue of components used in a range of engineering applications. It was never intentional on my part to relate my work to this incident and I only discovered the full extent of the problem that led to the failure when I recently found the report online and read it in detail. However, my dad did find the advert for the job and pointed me to it - was he aware of what the company did? I'll never know now as he has gone and I never kept a copy of the advert.

Some of the things he told me about the accident were truly terrible and are quite distressing. I don't know how the families coped with it.

Finally in 2013 a memorial was installed on the Markham Vale industrial estate that now sits on the site of the former colliery. It commemorates those who died in this disaster and in two prior disasters, particularly an explosion in 1938 that killed 79 and will stretch across the fields up to the village of Duckmanton, which was particularly devastated by the 1938 disaster, with a figure for each miner killed.



The Dead


Birkin, Joseph , aged 60, Face Worker
Briggs, Clarence , aged 52, Deputy
Brocklehurst, Joseph William , aged 58, Deputy
Brooks, Clifford , aged 58, Deputy
Chapman, Henry , aged 48, Deputy
Cooper, Gordon Richard , aged 30, Development Worker
Eyre, George, aged 60, Gearhead Attendant
Kilroy, Michael , aged 53, Development Worker
Kiminsky, Jan , aged 58, Development Worker
Plewinsky, Lucjam , aged 59, General Worker
Reddish, Frederick , aged 53, Development Worker
Rodgers, Wilfred , aged 59, Face Worker
Sissons, Charles Leonard, aged 43, Road Repairer
Stone, Frank , aged 53, Road Repairer
Turner, Charles Richard , aged 60, Deputy
Tyler, Albert , aged 64, Back Repairer
White, Alfred , aged 57, Deputy
Yates, William, aged 62, Development Worker

The Injured
Brothwell, Dennis; aged 44, Development Worker
Cowley,Frank; aged 43, Development Worker
Cowley, Malcolm Joseph; aged 29, Development Worker
Maxwell, John; aged 35, Reserve Face Worker (injured in the rescue attempt)
Reddish, James; aged 25, Development Worker
Richardson, Graham; aged 34, Heavy Supplies Worker
Stone, George Denis; aged 41, Overman
Taylor, Harry; aged 47, Development Worker
Thornley, Terence; aged 18, Face Trainee
Vaughan, Terence Graham; aged 38 Development Worker
Watson, William Henry; aged 47, Face Worker
Wrobels, Richard; aged 44, Face Worker

We were just one of many families who were deeply affected by that awful tragedy and the memories of that day and the weeks that followed are still painful. “My sister and I were 21 years old in 1973 so were of an age to clearly recall everything that happened

Read more at: http://www.derbyshiretimes.co.uk/news/markham-pit-the-day-a-community-fell-silent-1-5891510

Men were lying tangled together with shattered legs. I remember one young lad screaming in pain. He was given morphine but was still screaming

Read more at: http://www.derbyshiretimes.co.uk/news/markham-pit-memorial-for-miners-who-lost-their-lives-with-slideshow-1-5914370

“Men were lying tangled together with shattered legs. I remember one young lad screaming in pain. He was given morphine but was still screaming.”

Read more at: http://www.derbyshiretimes.co.uk/news/markham-pit-memorial-for-miners-who-lost-their-lives-with-slideshow-1-5914370

The Dog in the Hi-Viz

Written for my mate Dave Elsom's birthday - hope you like it!

This may have happened...

The Dog in the Hi-Viz

The small dog gaily trips along
He wears a tiny Hi-Viz coat
on a daily perambulation where
paths are marked and learned by rote

His Hi-Viz marks him out as special
It makes him bigger than he is
"You can't stop there!", "You can't do that!"
Authority is quite rightly his

He stops for a tiny but perfect poo
Stares at it with admiring eyes
that look accusingly at the man
"Clean it up!" the glance implies

The owner bends with plastic bag
as the officious canine checks his work
The stool is scooped, he seems content
that his so-called master didn't shirk

The lamppost is examined too
Sniff of wet and sensitive nose
Then delicately cocks his leg
in a confident yet careful pose

The world is safer than it was before
the tiny pooch checked out his route
wearing his tiny Hi-Viz vest;
Job done - and he looked so very cute

(c) Tim Fellows 2017