Deserto Rosso: Ravenscraig /
Ravenscraig, a Worker’s Poem
Poems 9-14 9] OUR NATURAL LANDSCAPE - ANNEE ZERO A red dumper eroded the landscape yesterday. Today the misty water towers fade in a drizzling rain. It sheets down in a wet tarpaulin It gusts round aimlessly until, wind whipped Drops skirl and scurry, machine the walls with hailstones, Drilling and hammering, thrashing our faces, and we Rain down our necks, macs glistening with rain Slop in the dust-mud the dumper’s churning up (Thin and sticky in parts; in parts more gritty and clogging) And we plod past the leaking pipes, smelling the oily air Filthy and loaded with acid. We crawl through the vast wet wasteland Passing immense beams, giant pipes, Uncanny, not seeing the beauty Or even a mouses movements Till finally, unthankfully, we shake down at a doorway Drenched wet nonentities Streaked with yellow mud we huddle our warm breath under our chins Dull and hostile and stare sightless at the world we’ve made. It hurts to see them in this haze The ways our life plods on till death crawls up The beauty of life, and how so few see it. The agony that’s human, and the going through it. Nothing matters. Ev’ryone chatters on and on Life creeps along till all agony is gone, nothing holds good. And should we pin some shadow of this beauty I will be subject soon to dulling duty Past poetry, but taught by rote. Beauty is never where you hope to find it It’s caught within that, flickering. Here beauty rusts in piles, an ocean of art, inexhaustible So, to the market, valueless No commodity is free to the sky like this So here lie rejected roses. In galleries faint artists sell small bits of revelation But here they return, renewing ideals in the flow of matter All art is the choice of nature.
10] DESERTO ROSSO Not the red desert, but deserted roses Red rust roses left with red steel thorns Ripped edges upright in a rat-tooth formation Each item fretting in the tense frustration Time’s slow gyration carving line and tone Triangle turrets jagging form to form. Beauty did not set itself in folded petals In the rusty metals where it settles lie the ready scraps for lumps of steel Feel the crumblng edges where the welder melted Dull red metal in his spasmic flame. Riveted ranks of shells, tattered tanks, burst guns Itemised, rusty, redundant sit like pensioned soldiers Out in the flat dirt country round the city Men build seawaves of muck, machines pile muck in mountains Still in the flat dust sheds around the city Steel is poured anew in white gold fountains Born of the dull ore and rust, rolled into rivers of fire, Rivers of silver, stripped down and coiled up for action Used to make dumper trucks, trucks that roll incessant The tides of Ravenscraig, the steel flows in and out. Dead trucks, dissected, old, lie here as bits of rust Transfigured, fragments graded, left to form The spikes and clots of Ravenscraig A shifting sculpture of roses and thorns In death, reborn. Man does not leave flowers this In all their gaudy show genetic death The blue-moon rose a hollow shell Its ovules impotent. Its petals purposeless, The vulgar graft its only strength. As roses die in time from wrongful use So most men’s souls have withered. The Glory’s gone. Our gentle flicker overgrown. But our outer husks of use And like herded cattle, within their uses penned We take no thought for the morrow – that long went from us Just like scrap and roses, only the death Of all our present state will make life purposeful Acts battle Acts Thoughts intersect with thoughts Triangles to higher levels Seeking in inner tension, perfection Humans between stars, each one a star loved and all loving, untarnished. In the red desert work creative warriors Dusty red cadres armed with black steel thorns.
11] FROM MY PULPIT A man smeared with soil, dirt denimmed with a shirt of oil Chucks something back and forth – watch his two arms move Pistons worn in their grooves. Ladles slop steel above him, swinging about, doing some job Not wholly understood. With a yank-chain out drops a teardrop, gold-hot, Falls in a silver yellow stream, splats a little sideways, Yelp! The man jumps Backwards, rubs his arm and returns to his job still smould’ring Slightly. I look from above Not caring much about such men, timeserving, full of sluggish blood And so the draggy day draws on till our degraded, dregged, grogged humanity Spills out of Ravenscraig and sullenly crawls home. Callous cycle we call a “working” life This too will die, sooner or later. That high hook will hang loose, swung from the ceiling In an empty works, devoid of any meaning In a ghost town that once was Motherwell Our plastic future waits. 12] EXPLAINING TRANSITIONAL AGONY As the oil and filth come dripping down small pools of rainbows form, When the lightning flashes overhead do you fear the passing storm? Then grope inside your dusty cave, we apes still see the dawn. 13] MEN, TREES, MOUNTAINS I look down from my pulpit and watch animal machines White safety helmets, blue boilersuits, trundling from job to job I find it impossible to feel in me their like-me humanity By the nature of sight objectified, these penguins with duck-bent heads, These scurrying ants, pressed by the bulk of Ravenscraig. So then I lift my eyes and soar in the hammerbeam roof, The cathedral arches and the dust stained glass from which God’s eyelashes pour down In light trails, picking out splashes of paint, individual rivets. My spirit arcs, my mind swings round like a magnet, spinning, then contact stuck on North. I join the web of ancestors and children, feeling our human past Men who made this, men who conceived it. The African who first melted iron, the Iron-Age men, The folks first to wrought iron, the steelmasters who brought it here, And feeling too, our future when I’m dead The stars to soar to with steel craft to come. Yet were they here, men of all ages, what could they see But a small animal in a helmet and a suit? We all melt down to this : amorphous carbon, No more, no less important than the mill itself Or the sick green moss that spreads on iron rich soil
“We made the ‘craig. Is that not proof That we are more important than a leaking roof? Not so. The mill made us as well. Even our own selves have no significance to us Each second shows one facet of our soul, yet time moves on A thought/act barely snatched, immediate and gone. All things must pass. If time held the additional dimension And if, undimensioned, we saw all time, we might see Our tapering worm of life slide back into parents and brothers Into Grandparents and their parents and their lovers Back to infinity and know then that all others Men and women, yes, and apes and fish And even plants, and even stones are part of us. But since time does exist above all this The loneliness of single vision must return to us And again we stand divided from the rest of mass. Life must unfold, and in the inward necessity to eat and grow We find the only truth we’ll ever know From trees we see the mountains and from mountains, trees. As forests were dying to savannah, men from the trees descended . Patterned by matter, speaking in gesture not speech. Pursued gazelles, tamed cows, grew corn. built walls. Women made pots, the engineers of Jericho, We built cities, classes, commodities and Capital. Here I stand, the past and future turn within my hand Then turn again to work, cold caution eggs me on I don’t know who to say it to, and the thread is gone. . 14] WHAT DO I DO HERE? I program computers controlling the stripmill I schedule the bars to drop, and others use the scheduling.