Upon Hull

I spent time in Hull when I was a student in 1983, working for what had been the White Fish Authority and had recently become "Seafish". I have been back a few times, but never for very long, often as a rugby referee or with the children for tennis events. I recently went back and had a bit of a drive round, then ran alongside the Humber to where I briefly worked.




Upon Hull

War, raging on the sea,
far from the city,
had shaken its foundations.

I walked the avenues
and breathed the cold air
where gulls cried.

Made phone calls in piss-soaked
white boxes
on the edge of nowhere.

Docks still alive with men,
fish processed on the quays
reeked with an ungodly
and malevolent odour.
Their dead eyes wept.

The diesel-stained train
pulled away from the city
that the poet so waspishly
put down.
The train departed but he stayed.

Across broken bridges the city splits,
each side lapping
from the slick waters.

I drive the twin lanes they built
to speed the traffic through.
No need to stay and look.

But I stay - I spend time, observe
the decaying, graffiti-stained
buildings I once worked.
Shattered glass sparkles.
Scudding clouds
head over bleak flatlands
to the killing grounds.

It parades its pawn shops,
vaping emporia and boarded-up
forgotten nightclubs.
Relentlessly and unapologetically
working class.

Here, where the fish once stank,
a retail heaven of glass and gaud.
The poet may have asked
"Which stinks more?"

Pockets of industrial resistance
break through dereliction
and try to stem the tide.

Grey-blue ebbing river,
choppy under knifing gusts -
the life-blood. Towers
stand in splendid defiance
as sparse traffic crosses its span.

A quick, blood soaked blade
once gutted this city -
flesh decaying,
rancid, spoiled.

I leave it behind once more,
receding in my mirror,
as the day warms
the fractured memories.

Tim Fellows 2019

Image by Andrew Sidebottom from Pixabay