STALEY BRIDGE  STALYBRIDGE

STALEY BRIDGE  STALYBRIDGE

this is Staley bridge
my father’s birthplace

here is a picture
of me in a pram
my sister
in a pram

on a big bridge
crossing the Tame river

this is not
that Staley bridge where
the Saxons crushed the
Vikings
      rushing back to

meet my
Norman ancestors at Hastings

and we
know what happened there

****

Yes, here we are
up front Mossley
in that picture, my
                       Mother

daughter of a war hero
pushing our pram

and there, no doubt,
the great cotton mills
still
     doing their job though
not now in
their hey day

          postmodernity,
postcoloniality

what landscape altering modes
of production ushered
in in
     their wake

      and here is Engels incliding
text on this place in his seminal
work on
the working class
in England

and here I am
years later, studying satire living
in his monument house
in Oxford Street Manchester

water
under this bridge, water
connecting
us all
    Tipperary, Stalybridge,
Mahikeng South Africa

figures
      in a Lowry paintimg
                                  they come
and they go

water
    under this bridge then
so much water we
tend to
   forget about
                        water headed
to the port of slavery

same water in the skiffle
psychedelia of those

Sergeant Pepper people
magicians of the airwaves
conjurors of
                        a whole new
line
    in identity
fruit of the clash of
working class proclivities
with
    transcendental
mind

clash, I say,
but what a melding, beloved
blending

without which
no way this space, or place,
or room
       to talk

gone these guys
         or finally fading

gone
those mills of my childhood
Spitfire stories
      of how
                we stood alone

everything reconfigured,
outright repurposed

voices (and their words)
I fail to recognise, alien
strange

elevated above whilst
so out of frame

somehow talking all
necessities of suppression
       commandeering everything

stretching

    the distance below
to above

       to breaking point

viewed from
the Southern tip of Africa, product
victim of
all that this is metonym of
all this place
             this life
of which
           I speak

ths
shock
     could not be more
                               extreme

(so dark
               these river with
their druid name

                 we cross
all our lives

each
    every day

        so quietly  all
determining)