Poetry

Ghosttown

Empty trains rattle past, the electricity in their stunned veins
force feeding the wind through the trees and green
that now arc over the speared fence beyond which this town stands.

What was once relative wealth and mines is now charity shops
and heaving pubs. The crowd too young to remember coal or dignity or pride
are now thankful for a Kwiksave, Wetherspoons and Burger King.

Once a month I come here from my end to sit in the same seat
smoking roll-ups, stare from the same window to a roundabout
full of cars going nowhere. Life shifts coalhouses to housing developments.

My friend’s father sometimes returns here amongst what is forgotten
though his expertise done with, he has dusted down and moved on.
The decision was made many hundreds of miles from this place

and he felt the full force of it, closing the door behind him.
No one is exactly bitter about it, and what’s past is past
but there’s a strong prevailing sense that the best days are gone.

An industrial estate. A strip club. An off-license. A mobile phone shop.
A town with essentials, amenities, a standard of living.
Then why this stagnancy that rests on the street corners,

the thick poignant sediment in this pint of bitter, or the sleepless stare
of one in the far corner who’s slashed well before lunchtime?
Unsettled, I down the dregs and hop on a bus that heaves away

whistling with a gear change an almighty crunch.
Life moves on with new people, new offices, new jobs,
while the mines echo terribly their something out of the last century.

Blackhole

Holding his hand to the wall, my father talks
of women, of the stars, of love’s loss and middle-age,
pausing to drag on a cigarette, his face stern and weatherworn.

I take the mug of tea he silently proffers from the window ledge
and sit down on the wall, watching the weak spindly trees
get beaten about at the bottom of the garden by sharp winds.

Sitting down next me, he points out the North Star.
He knows it’s something I’ve been able to find for long enough,
but old habits die hard. Just there, he motions whilst joining the dots,

The Little Dipper. Then, The Plough. Orion’s Belt.
The stars are my father’s realm. I feel rooted to the ground.
He gets up, flicks hot ash at the grass; I sit in silence.

The door slides shut. Mug empty and fag stubbed out, I look upwards.
Again, the stars stare down from the heavy void of sky
as I pick out the North, but realise the rest are suddenly nameless;

flashing and flickering absurdities. Now the moon
eyes me widely and accusingly, like a snake, unblinkingly,
like the pale-faced inverse of a cold blackhole. The wind stills to rainfall.

Tuesday

Entering the tutorial room in stuttered separations, we come
from lectures on the Romantics, Shakespearean tragedy,
or else from late brunches: milk, buttered toast and wholegrain cereal.

The tutor arrives and the TV set flickers,
a buzz of pure static, sliding the cassette into the bowels of the VCR.
We fall silent. Nuit et brouillard hovers on the screen,

widening, and a few at the back fidget, climbing onto the tables
for a better view, a field outside Oświęcim scanning.
Barbed wire, empty buildings, the black and white march of the Nazis.

I wonder: is this enough? Is it too much? In our freshly washed
clothing, our shampooed heads and recurrent central heating,
we can only stare at the skeletal inmates, eyes wide as moons,

their raggedly oversized pyjamas hanging striped before us.
Taken aback, abashed, glued to the set for the gruelling
thirty and two minutes, we are unable to even speak afterwards,

time enough left to discuss, as scheduled. But the feeling
is silent and infectious. The tutor cannot help but sense it. A silent alarm.
Instead, dismissed, we move outwards, leaving in lines,

not daring to talk, not even in whispers. How could we talk?
Not until the familiar drone of traffic fills the pavement’s silence
can we utter a word, not until our world returns,

the world we think of as strangely separate.  

Ben Wilkinson

Founding member of the University's Poetry Society. He has work forthcoming in The Red Wheelbarrow.