The Coming of Industry to Cornwall

They were people, but not as you and I,

in that nineteenth century haze

who saw the native hills erupt around them,

fields that had been pregnant an age with ore

from ages long past induced to labour

in ugly Victorian industrial agony.

Hedge, gorse and round ripped asunder

for profit as the valley and coombe men

called rejoice in poverty for what was found

in the womb beneath.

For metal pulsed in the veins of the land.

Cornwall being impregnated by saints’ spawn

or the secret bastard of dragons,

a seam, a vein, a pulse that had been taxed

by the invasive Roman eye.

And those missionaries later only as real

as tin and copper plated priests

honouring their peninsula

instead of gaudy gold in richer places.

The ore glowed, holy greed,

metal beyond death underground.

So, although the menfolk knew

the pulse that was a serpent

unsound under their footfall,

the coming of the mines was

necessary plague upon the land.

 

Where there was thatch,

Methodist meeting halls

in contemplative half valleys,

over scale monoliths erupted,

pumping stations, beam engine sheds,

towered buildings church big and more,

sucking folklore and blood from the soil,

pounding the earth in places where

the elves called Knockers cried mercy,

and the new secret streams ran red

with effluent blood.

But these dark mine buildings were cathedrals

blessings for those who scratched

subsistence from fields,

who delved subservient in shallow mines

a star gazey crust away from death.

 

Bal Maidens like priestesses

in high headdresses, over-praying to industry;

Cornwall had its blood worked to death

to pay the upcountry piper somewhere

long before their progeny came here

to disgracefully replace them.

Tin coast full of ore and slag barely

concealed by undergrowth

away from the bedazzling beaches,

and a breath, something else,

some told you so echoed

in an older tongue.