Requiem
Steel recipe, set and matched: ore, coal, fast waters,
prepared for sheet, ingot, rivet, ball and chain;
a town’s frame, and rail girdling of the world,
a region’s wages, and a county’s welfare,
shut down with fantasy of horses, carriages.
Gangsters? Gang-masters? Elizabeth Windsor inclines,
conceding power play to Chinese imports,
cheap steel, and cut-price smiles, and bargain basement
headline: ‘A Golden Era’, unless you’re victim.
Only nine hundred of those in the latest closure,
and even if you bleeding heart multiply
community effects, it’s barely a vulnerable majority.
And people are used to hunger in those sorts of places,
and no-one today remembers their ghosts, the marchers.