Going Back
GOING BACK
It was not an endearing place, a storybook place
With little cottages and
Loaded fruit trees from which apples could be casually filched,
Nor were there sparkling streams for pushing hot feet into in July,
Or even grassy parks where the dog and the kids could romp
And old men sit and smoke pipes.
My childhood England was industrial, dark and dirty,
And instead of the skirl of bagpipes or the weeping of a fiddle,
There were the round-the-clock sirens and
Whistle-changes of factory shifts
And the clash of steel loads being trucked to the docks.
It threatened to suffocate me,
To imprison my mind between slabs of coal and pints of brown ale,
And when I walked the streets in search of meaning I found nothing
Except a weekly cycle of movies showing how real people lived.
I emerged from it and never returned -
And quickly forgot its worthless heritage of coal-dust, and
Found real places and lived a real life far beyond the horizons
Drawn by the schools of Gateshead.
Now, however, in the silent moments of creeping age and grown children,
The steep streets pitching down to the teeth of the Tyne
Gnaw into my fattened mind and reach to the bones of my brain
Where the smell of coaldust still lingers -
And always will.
And I feel again the empty places, the dark places, the places calling
My name in a strange dialect I have long abandoned.
Somehow they seem less cold and uninviting:
Their song is not off-key;
And the horizons drawn by my own hand
Seem to merge together in that blackened townscape.
God forbid I should ever end up there for good;
But I hear its siren song and cannot shake its
Foundation stones free of my structured life.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
NOTES
Gateshead is an industrial city in northern England.... imagine Akron, Youngstown, Toledo, Essen, Chemnitz, or similar towns, and it will give an idea of Gateshead.
River Tyne is the river on which Gateshead stands, now a pleasant waterway , then more like an open sewer.
Copyright © Sidney Beck | Year Posted 2011
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