for Dick Davis
Blackened walls: a Gothic height
Crouches and does not soar, locked
To the earth like slabs of outcrop stone
That touch no God; they imitate
Monoliths of the moors. Smokebound
Maze of streets in a northern town,
Low-skied misted marshland: ghosts
Haunt him, a grave imagination.
Mist merged with industrial smoke
Where the ghosts swim:
Their scrawny bodies topped with blackened heads
Like those that peer through jungle leaves.
Manufacturers, poets, moralists, colonisers, all
Engendered empires of despair
Built on blackness in the grey air.
What does the grey stone mask? Such battlements
Attest obscure defence.
His mind draws
Close to its melancholy: as
In dank winter to the heaped log-fire
Of a Saxon hall, beyond whose walls
What lurks in greyness?
Castles from dark days his reason
Girdles like siege but preserves,
Long years of siege that constitute defence;
Renascence ghosts, dark blood
Steams on the axe – industrial fumes
Dry the blood of the starved worker – marshland
Dank at sunset the sky bleeds
Pillarbox red.