(Sooner or Later)
Staring down
Cottonopolis Road I still see
Mill
chimneys, sticking up as defiant digits
To this
digital world. There’s a mischievous tree
Sprouting
from one as if, despite its height, it fits.
This then is
the realm of King Coal and Queen Cotton
These days.
Sooner or later they’ll be forgotten.
Edwardian
villas, grand once but shabby now,
Are reminders
rendered in red brick of great wealth
Spun from
mills, woven in sheds, that slipped by somehow
Spinners and
weavers donkey stoning off the filth
Belched smoke
soot-smutted along millstone terraces,
Becoming,
sooner or later, heritage places.
In one villa,
being minded by milling carers,
Laid out on
cotton sheets in a drawn-curtain room,
And almost,
almost prepared for the pall bearers,
The fent of a
woman frays. So I must assume
My position
as her son for days, weeks perhaps,
Until, sooner
or later, the yarn of her life snaps.
Dave Alton
