Building site Walsall 2009

 
 Hoardings shouting at the street,  
those in buses reading as they pass  
of perfume, razor blades and Guinness,  
selling space and advertising  
keeping secret from the public  
the future of their city,  
where JCBs move piles of earth  
to mould a future better than the past.  
Where  once workers toiled.  
Houses where they lived cheek-by-jowl  
in terrace row and corner shop  
midst laughter, spinning tops and shawls  
smutted wash lines wall to wall.  
Evening pubs with glittering mirrors  
nicotine ceilings, sawdust floors,  
counters lined with glasses,  
as hooters sound the end of day  
on the way to home, to crowded streets,  
like seagulls on the cliffs at Flambro'  
(how did they know which nest?).  
Wife and kids around the table,  
scrubbed and white no cloth to hide the knots,  
armchair for Dad, stools for the kids,  
chair beside the sink for Mam.  
Pigeons to feed and whippets,  
shoes to sole and wood to chop,  
fishing canals for roach and pike  
barges low with coal and pots from Stoke.  
Smells of tanning, thumping hammers,  
freight  trains through the night,  
flashing furnace fires, bed by ten, up at six  
Blake's Jerusalem on a school piano.