Sinister: Monday Pome time

[Heinitz]

oh, how much sadness is here... i do feel for all of you, it's horrible to build
your hopes up so much and then - nothing. 
i hope you are in a mood to read a poem, because i have one. it's by a man
called Donald Davie, and it's called "Barnsley & District". 
i hope it goes some way to comfort everybody who's feeling low.


Judy Sugden! Judy, I made you caper
With rage when I said that the British Fascist
Sheet your father sold was a jolly good paper

And you had agreed and I said, Yes, it holds
Vinegar, and everyone laughed and imagined
The feel of the fish and chips warm in its folds.

That was at Hood Green. Under our feet there shone
The modest view, its slagheaps amethyst
In distance and white walls the sunshine flashed on.

If your father's friends had succeeded, or if I
Had canvassed harder for the Peace Pledge Union,
A world of difference might have leapt to the eye

In a scene like this which shows in fact no change.
That must have been the summer of '39.
Yet I go back sometimes, and find nothing strange -

Short circuiting of politics engages
The Grammar School masters still. Their bright sixthformers sport
Nuclear Disarmament badges.

And though at Stainborough no bird's-nesting boy
Nor trespasser from the town in a sunday suit
Nor father twirling a stick can now enjoy

Meeting old Captain Wentworth, in his grey
And ancient tweeds, gun under arm, keen-eyed
And unemployable, and get a gruff Good-day,

His rhododendrons and his laurel hedge
And tussocked acres are not more unkempt
Now that the Hall is a Teachers' Training College.

The parish primary school where a mistress once
Had every little Dissenter stand on the bench
With hands on head, to make him out a dunce;

Blank backs of flourmills, wafer-rusted railings
Where I ran and ran from colliers' boys in jerseys,
Wearing a blouse to show my finer feelings -

These still stand. And Bethel and Zion Baptist,
Sootblack on pavements where the miners' spittle
Starred flattened kerb and greasy flag, persist.

George Arliss was on at the Star, and Janet Gaynor
Billed at the Alhambra, but the warmth
Was no more real then, nor the manners plainer.

And politics has no landscape. The Silesian
Seam crops out in prospects felt as deeply
As any of these, with as much or as little reason.


also, my thoughts are with the band (so what's new?), especially our dear
isobel. hope she gets better soon.

much love, abi
x

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