In the Lord Line Building
There's a feeling of sadness
Mixed with a wistful awe
As we pick our careful way
Across a rubble strewn floor.
An eerie sort of half light,
As though hiding from the day,
Hiding our history until
It's finally thrown away.
This building still stands
Though gutted inside:
I suppose now it represents
A city's lost pride.
Graffitied walls
Fittings smashed
Not much left
Of its proud past.
I can see the lock gates.
Now sealed against the tide,
Imagine an old sidewinder
Waiting patiently inside:
Waiting to land wet fish
That valuable tasty haul
Brought safely on board
From its bulging trawl.
Imagine steel segged clogs
clacking clicking up the road,
Bobbers walking the tunnel
To handball this load.
Seen from a window the old dock
Just a sea of reeds, silted and gone
Hiding a chequered past
As time has moved on.
I sit to reflect for a while
On a broken office chair:
I can feel the past
Flowing through me there.
Such a sense of sadness
Now filling my head
Time to get up and leave,
This building is now dead.
One last walk around outside
See huge cracks in the wall.
How long before the dozers
Finally make the bricks fall.
On the White Fish Authority roof
Children have set a fire
Maybe a symbolic recognition
Of its coming funeral pyre.
The flames gutter and die
As the children run away
And the once proud building
Survives yet another sad day.
This piece of history can be saved
If we don't wait too long
Like so much of our past
Once it's gone it's gone,
Who’ll remember the sidewinders
And their Bell Bottomed Boys
In this place of eerie silence
Once so full of life and noise.
A sparrow hawk stoops
As we walk away
A sort of hopeful end
To a sad and weary day.
I was asked to do a voiceover for an independent Documentary Film Maker, and so had the privelege of entry into prohibited places. After hours of filming over many weeks the project was sadly put on hold with the arrival of Covid 19.
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