Deserto Rosso Ravencraig Part 4

Deserto Rosso: Ravenscraig /

Ravenscraig, a Worker’s Poem

Poems 15-21

15] MAN AS THE KALE GROWS, WINTER TURNS HIM SWEET Steel we direct at steel desks Sitting sniffing and picking our teeth we forge our futures without steel, Without us, without the adjusting forces that led us here.

Life is unfolding and in the process The wall of one maze confines the path of another until As needs combine together, new paths divide.

Within all this that thing called “man” came here Impelled at basest by sheer need.

Technique allows, we build technique.

One day even we will stop rustling the sports pages Writing our own pages, ripping theirs up.

Men make Men make Men make and break One day we’ll make some men and break their moulds forever.

What’s Jim there made of?

Reports, steel, broken wings.

Look out there – steelworks for miles.

Red rust, steel girders, roads and rails and muck, Gouging out huge mouthfuls of ores not ours Building for units to habitate, not homes.

Oh it has great beauty A heavy beauty, deep in clinging oil.

Men’s work, machine made, solid. Here, hold a handful Stretch out your hearts to the span of girders Rattle your ears and your mind in the channelling thunder “Come away. Quick” They pile slabs 19 high, each slab a foot thick Between rows a 2 foot space (that’s where you walk).

Often they’re red with heat, an ugly beauty Imagine the fear I feel A dwarf I maze between them, the heat Spreads across my cheek, the Fear Makes me rush. Once, walking through, I heard a yell.

“Watch out, above”.

The tortured wail of a chain dropping pulled my ears right up A hot bar, unsteady, about to be dropped on the pile. I ran Then found myself in a white mist, the steam From a water trough blew up, so, blinded and scared I stood stock still Between the hot slabs (I felt the warmth on my face) While the yell still echoed round me, and the squeal Of the chain still kept on dropping.

A cold wind blew the steam clear That was last year I’m still here, more foolish, less scared.

And at the furnace death lies lurking The fires glare out, then stalking Victims the flames burp out – but you get no warning It keeps us on our toes (at first).

Large magnets on chains swing, dangling the crop-ends, tons of steel Often it is you see one falling. We move here learning, ducking Occasional dangers, but the hot bridge burns your shoes And the scorched smell of rubber reminds your nose That you are mortal.

So come away quick.

There are 2 ways to see this place – You could visit, or work here. I’d advise You do neither.

But if you do come look beyond the paint and publicity And the flowers they daub on the mill when Melchett comes, Look beyond that Look at the needs of humankind – there is Ravenscraig.

16] COMPUTER POEM Reds, Greens and Golds Our computer unfold Its key light patterns dancing.

Datafull light, it flowers at night in our image.

Do you see? Legend and living, glinting, outgiving In poems of numbers its sagas of steel Controlled by our codes, it nodes all our needs in its way It dazzles, directing our futures, unknown.

But the fact Of Capital’s use of automation Is that our need will be decreed By some previous generation.

And the fact Of Capital’s use of automation Is that it won’t be flowers Or shorter working hours But a selective elimination Of a large percentage of our working population And since their power of buying Won’t be supplying Capital’s regeneration Profits will fall And we will all Either destroy, or be destroyed by, that situation.

17] NEW PAINT I see the same decay in seeming advance in this bright paint I’m told that painterworkers breath it in (as we do dust) And that their lungs are destroyed by the droplets that hang Drifting in the atmosphere.

18] BACKSHIFT “Steel is Steel and Men are Men” This is too small, too sane an axiom.

Here men grow lungs of steeldust, steel leaves its feel on them Men spend their whole lives forging and forged Years spent around quite ordinary jobs Transmuting metals, modern alchemists.

Ravenscraig is here, Here’s where to start So……….. …….Ev’ry aching crash Smashes brains to ash. BACKSHIFT! In the rhythm of this stress scheme enter man’s confusion Regularly turns the engine, round it turn our patterns Mechanistic, slow as water, aeons tiny tricklings Carve a hole straight through the forehead, hitting quite remorseless

Quite relentless, beat, beat, Dulls our shuffling grey feet.

Working flat out in a steel mill day drags on so dully Ears dull aching, muscles shaking, eerie engines wailing Oven furnace fire’s heat blasting, eyes and eyelids eaten Body cracked, mind emptied, racked in each-man-one-job boredom Change of toil suspends it, Reaching sixty ends it.

First our minds but soon our carcases break in this racket Morals moulder, tempers smoulder, flicker, die in ashes.

If you ponder how the father can go off his rocker – Lamb into the slaughter – Kill his wife and daughter Feel your bones ring, feel your ears sing, wear the wage slaves’ halter Your opinions alter Moral judgements falter.

“It’s no excuse, human refuse deserves to be convicted!”

Where’s the prison worse than this one, Ravenscraig unending?

Iron walls and padlocked gates, even the black-frocked warders, Barbed-wire fences round the steelmill, workers can’t be trusted We’d welsh on our contract Steal our hours production.

“This existence is subhuman?” you grasp little yet then.

All our lives were made by human motive, greed and wanting.

All of this could be controlled, the noise and danger end, but Aching souls won’t mend Capital can’t bend.

You say there’s no classes, here’s a class can educate you.

Think you workers made this hell because they knew no better?

Easy to imagine engines made for men to work with But their cost could cut back profit, pity doesn’t enter Capital’s equation – Spendthrifts cause inflation.

To return to what I’ve learned: one paycheque means one heartbreak Round the bend but never end production, day shift, night shift.

Engines pound, alarm bells sound, another inputs ended His life inconsequential His widow gets her pension.

They don’t welsh on their contracts.

They pay you quite good wages.

They have a boundless bounty For giving back some products To those who made them for them.

They give the widows pensions.

It helps them face the morning, To return to what I’ve learned: a paycheque means a heartbreak Ev’ry aching crash Pounds some brain to ash –NIGHTSHIFT! In the rhythm of this stress scheme enter man’s confusion Regularly beats an engine, round it fall our patterns Mechanistic, slow as water, aeons tiny tricklings Carve a hole straight through the forehead, hitting quite remorseless Quite relentless, beat, beat, Dulls our shuffling grey feet.

19] RAVENS CRAIG Half a moon, The great sheds loom like corrugated ghosts And in their hosts the blackened chimneys sail on clouds of smoke.

The amber sky imbeds a frieze of random silhouettes.

The horizontal arabesques of wires draw fire into the night And antmen, empty, eat away the hours.

20] THE CRAB Oh, I remember him, “The Crab”.

He shuffled around with his back bent Hands on his knees, pipe hanging off his lip, Squinting into the fire, limbs at exact angles, Peering at the slab, laid like a coffin on the sleds, Tapping his pipe on a step rail, quickly Scuttling up a catwalk as a black beetle scurrying Divining the state of the fire from the changing colours of a lamp That hung from the roof dangling in the furnace outlet smoke Its shade more yellow, more blue, as the chemistry Of the slab in the fire changed the smoke and the colour of the flame.

Tricks of the Trade.

“You can’t get that from your dials!”

Sixty years.

“Naebody kens this fire like me!”

He made it his business keeping the trade to himself

The new lads could learn by watching him work – “Mebbe” he’d say with a laugh. Hard the learning A few burns or scars would help them remember though He never taught with words – “Look at it, son” How to make battleplate for dreadnaughts?

He was the only one left who knew that, he said, “Massive stuff. It’d crack if you so much as looked at it” The Fear and the Pride were this man.

Pride in a skill, and fear of an age which did not respect it And terror of old fingers and a growing loss of skill.

In time we automated that job.

He got the golden handshake of course, and a wee goodbye from the works.

And now his crabbed body isn’t here And the furnace he mastered like a fishing line Still rolls on, despite that.

21] TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME Bronchitic Ravenscraig, made by us, remaking us Our lungs, our steel, our cars, our dreams, All influenced by and influencing you in creative cycles.

Rust to rust through steel, dust to dust breathed through our bodies, Buried with us and reborn in the dull dust coated dandelions Aye, even after death, even the gravestones erode in the atmosphere Their small lung sculptures circling the kirk with gasping holes And withered, half-pagan, crosses, like small decaying roses, Ravenscraig.

Vast directed conception of man that no man can encompass.

There’s so much here. So many beauties, spars and spans and angles Horizontals, Verticals, Thrown Cantilevers, Gantries Crans and Beams.

I look a third of a mile down the roof, a line of lines, of lightbeams Sharp cut in the dust bisect, trisect the intersecting girders, All of these patterns set at intervals, their cutting clear or dusty, Lit or dull, archspans and pipelines, all of this Is the intricate and lovely geometry of Ravenscraig.

The Cables strung strong like vines Slung in an iron forest of roofing spans.

The seven chimneys, tall, thin, for ever pulsing Thick purple dust up into the azure sky.

Under all this, so many lives, so many jobs Each its own philosophy of ebb and cycle,

Growth and decay, A growing market and a dying trade.

So many facts are undigested.

A man shunts switches all night long, reads dials in a smoky cockpit.

What’s he then? White or Blue Collar?

Grey all of them, Grey and Dusty Red. Reality has moved 200 years in front of language Poetry droops, it falls still further behind So much to ravenscraig So much for humankind to know.