Political Wasteland Poem by Roger Hudson

Through train window
Eerie landscape
Fires, furnaces, floodlights
Of foundries, factories, chemical plant
Glaring hazily jaggedly

Through thick fog darkness of early evening
In industrial Yorkshire
Detached from invisible buildings
That house them

And busy nightshifts manning them
Like greedy will o' the wisps
Declaring dominance of all-devouring industry
Cloaking generations-learnt skills
Of myriads of craftsmen and technicians

Silent
In clinging fog
From rattling train

Except for banshee siren,

A foghorn

Distant, half-heard, forelorn.

Years turn
Just a few

In smooth car comfort
Drive through same once-industrial landscape

Now barren dark desert of brown earth

No derelict mill
No skeletal foundry
No rusting shipyard

Empty, eyeless
Stands testimony to past achievements

All razed to the ground
Flattened
Gone

Awaiting redevelopment

At some future date
When the economy recovers

A sacrifice to one politician's obsession with destroying trade unions