Dead Men's Fingers: The Tay Brig Disaster Dec 28th 1879 7.16pm Poem by Sheena Blackhall

Eighty metres down,
Conger eels slide eerie through dark canyons
Dead men's fingers glow in murky fathoms
Water, colder than ice, turns on its side
There's rip tide currents, tons of tumbling waves

In winter,1879 after seven at night
A train, six carriages, over seventy souls
Plunged through a falling bridge
The longest bridge in the world
Into unimaginable terror

A storm ripped through the sky,
Eighty five miles an hour of airy punch
Tearing slates from rooves, toppling chimney pots
As bad, one witness stated
As any typhoon seen in the China seas

Plunged into the rearing waves
The innocents
Isabella Neish,4
Robbieand Davie Watson,6 and 8

Elizabeth Brown, tobacco spinner aged 14
Archie Bain, farmer aged 23
Thomas Anan, iron turner aged 20
James Crichton, ploughman aged 22
Euphemia Cheape domestic servant aged 54

The provost of Dundee described the motion
Of trains he'd travelled on when crossing the bridge
As ‘Prancing, bounding, dirling'
Painters who'd worked on the bridge
Told how it shook with every passing train
A driver agreed that it moved when a train was on it
A joiner noticed the shaking worse
When trains were going faster,

An engineer described the storm on land
The chandeliers in his house rattled and tinkled
Seven chimney pots were blown down from his roof

A carriage inspector described the sky itself
The moon came out and in through passing clouds
Like a blinking eye. His window panes blew out
The moon shone cold. No cats paws on the water
Ravenous waves reared up, and then crashed down

There were no survivors
On a Sabbath day in Winter
All of the live cargo died