Breaker's Yard Poem by Roy Ballard

This is a charnel house for paid-off ships,
skid shovels, dozers, bowsers, mobile cranes
and this trench digger on whose iron lips
the closing gulp of chalk still shows its stains.
Like that cadaver on the morgue's cold bench
whose toes and finger nails were painted red,
her usual makeup, with a final wrench,
appealing vainly to us now she's dead.
Here is a dredger armed with massive screws,
rain-water flooded, swamped with reeds and sedge;
an odd inversion that decay should choose
to grow in it the fen it used to dredge.
The dragonfly has come. An oily bloom
floats with the lily in the engine room.