A small fish hangs still, in a dim cloudy jar,
Sucking and gasping as life seeps away.
And the old mans wet eyes are unfocussed, off-far,
As the dust drowns his lungs, and his face draws grey.
Yanked from a pit, dug out the clay,
A pond floating rubbish and stuff thrown away,
The fish was the prize of a small lonely kid,
Watching, dumb, as it died. That’s what things did.
The kid emptied the jar at the back of the yard
Flung it hard, so it smashed, and ran up the tip,
A hillock of coal waste, bulking sullen and dire,
Steep, so his blood raced, thin legs bent like wire.
He scrabbled up rocks, clinker and shale
Slipping and scarring his bare skin and bone,
Pushing on higher with gasps short, and painful,
Heart pumping on anger, until burned up and gone.
With staggering last efforts he broaches the top
And spins a vertiginous three sixty degrees,
Seeing forever and way out past the squalor
encroaching the streets, the industrial disease.
Shivering now, in worn shorts and shirt,
Alone, but alive, on a black hill of dirt,
The kid looks off far, over wreckage below
Over slag heaps, and marl holes and rusting decay,
A place with its guts spilt, then just kicked away;
Its his home and he can’t go …
And he’s a kid, so he must stay.