Don Valley, Sheffield
Written by Brian Walsham
Mist shrouds the valley bottom.
Barrack-like factories crowd for warmth.
Long, black steelwork sheds,
Soot and red-oxide encrusted,
Squat, like dinosaurs, beside river, road, canal.
Years since,
A thousand chimneys darkened the noonday sky,
Cranes swung scrap iron,
On greedy magnets;
Fuel for voracious furnaces.
Steam hammers thudded through the night,
Armour plated suits for Dreadnoughts
Were ironed in monstrous, hell-like laundries.
The pot-bellied steel-melter,
Smudged sweat scarf round size 16 neck,
Replenished his body’s fluids at the corner pub.
At Endcliffe, Fulwood,
Mark Firth and John Brown passed the port,
Debating the need for another almshouse.
The almshouses still are there.
Through pantechnicon-width openings
The furnaces still glare.
Few corner pubs are left vertical
Among the rubble-strewn acres where steelworkers
sonorously snored
In one-up, one-down, back-to-back,
Cheap brick terraces.
The clanking tram, blue sparks jumping at the points,
Long since itself has fed the furnaces.
By bus, melter, forger, labourer travel now,
Or shiny Datsun rusting at the kerb.
The Datsun is an omen.
Cementation furnaces, Siemans open-hearth furnaces,
Bessemer converters are obsolete now.
Steel is imported, as are cutlery blanks.
The ironmaster and the little mester
Share the same weed-choked General Cemetry.