Hopton Wood Poem by Martin Ward

Limestone from Hopton Wood;
hidden- away and buried-beneath
the skin: running for twenty-five miles
through arteries that course deep.

Dressing the finery of Chatsworth;
Westminster Abbey; Oscar Wilde's Tomb,
and The Houses of Parliament:
that Parliament, within whose walls,
clean hands raised Heavenwards
to vote for bloody war.

But finer are those stones
sent to honour foreign fields;
row after row, like teeth on edge.

Bearing the weight of Atlas,
a special line created to emigrate
blasted stone from home,
for those we did not repatriate.
One hundred and twenty thousand of them,
for the noblesse: boys who tended pit ponies;
fathers who toiled on land; mill and factory workers,
who sleep in strange soil.

Some stones stayed at home: see them, broken, incomplete,
filling-in the dry stone walls near Middleton-by-Wirksworth.

Empty now, her fallopian tubes:
chilling in the winter air;
the summer air or any air that dares
to venture near the bitter wrath
of Mother Earth, who holds Her own.

In nearby Shining Wood,
where 'Rock- a- bye baby'
first whistled through the trees,
the ghosts of mothers,
restless in their wanderings,
sing in mournful, wailing tones,
for children, lost.

Finger nails would have scratched
the names and homilies,
were they not carved,
with love, from Hopton Wood.