More Home Thoughts from Abroad

Cherry

By Ewan

Wed, 12 Jul 2017
  • 720 reads
2 comments
 

The shiny new Vue,

blocky cinema complex,

showing simple films.

 

The “new” Post Office,

over thirty years old now,

sorting fewer letters.

 

Our railway station,

proud atop the Embankment

looking down on slums.

 

The sirens pierce

birdsong in the midnight streets:

nightingale drunks sing.

 

The trains kept rolling

out of North Road to Empire,

until they stopped.

 

This town made bridges,

from steel milled and rolled right here,

where Morrison(')s is.

 

It's the Safeway to

keep the dull proles in Fine Fare,

Co-Operative.

 

This town, this grey town

splashes colour with money

painting over lives.

 

Image  owned by Jackie Britton posted on Darlington As It Looked 1880-1980

Facebook Page.

 

Certificate U
Poem
Miscellaneous

Comments

Submitted by Ed Crane on

as I read your perfect description of "British Banal."

(I meant the typical towns you describe so well, not your poem!)

 

 

Submitted by Ewan on

reading, Ed.
I just find it so sad, all the jobs are zero hour contracted mcjobs in "telecoms" (meaning call centres), warehousing and shops. There's nothing wrong with working in a shop, but when you're on a zero hours contract on minimum wage there's something wrong with your employers. Darlington was one end of the first railway in Britain. It had steel mills, rolling mills and one of British Rail's biggest offices at Stooperdale, where (okay it was 1979) the computers were state of the art with punch operators, massive magnetic tape discs and about 300 people working there. Cleveland Bridge and Torringtons were two of the biggest civil engineering concerns in Britain. Gone, all gone.

Ah well, progress is important.

Best

Ewan.
 

Author Page at the 'Zon