for Durham County Cricket Club


Winter skies over Durham. In the stratosphere
high winds stretch the clouds to thin scarves,
the moon in the bloom of a shawl, beneath
the long twilight, the heartbeat of the ground,
the shrouded wicket in hibernation, Kings bring
no gifts to lay on the turf on Twelfth Night,
the stable is empty of redemption, although
the evening star shines its solitaire diamond,
the ring of empty seats is not to be crowned.
The great cricket circle is that fairy ground
we do not trespass, sacred, holy, guarded
by the past, theatre of Albion’s angels dressed
in white, a rite unconditional, fortress
of a treasure not to be bought or sold. Who
has entered the house and broken the hearth?
What vandal has clothed the air in despair?
The hearth goods ransacked. The empty seats
with no future. The Test lamp sentinels
with no switch. The embrace of the ground
is a widow without children. The vandals
entered without mercy. Struck down the pride
of Durham, put down the unarmed servants
in their quarters, the pennants were in tatters.
Sold off the warriors. Broke bonds of allegiance.
Men who are money Barons. They have no shame.
They are debt collectors. They scatter the village
and its green. They pillage what remains, the cups
looted from the cupboard. Mark them by their blows,
mark them by their words: This is a warning to others.
Eat grass. Eat the harshness of our deeds. Beg.
You are broken and defeated before the sun rises
and after the sun sets for five seasons by our reckoning,
shackled by our chains. Who will come to your aid?
We are dark lords. High winds racing above the earth
are turning clouds into scarves, the moon loses her shawl,
the ground is a shrine to the faithful, blessed by pilgrims.
Who will bring spear and sword? Jerusalem
was builded here among dark satanic mines.

January 2017

A cold wind from a cold coast,
the North Sea where foghorns
bleat like lost sheep. The fret

will tendril its way to Pennine
hills, over the shivering rivers
and the closed doors of the street.

From one windy village to another,
where high streets are just a row
on the brow, everything extracted

that looks like work, the decline
of towns that slip into harbours,
the once pretty villas uncared for

on the cliff edge. Unfinished
roads that wind through new
warehouse sheds to rusted

wire. You could understand
the depleted hope that never felt
austerity was anything but

punishment and the scorn of
a certain voice that called them
undeserving of the fat of the land

kept for those of certain income.
A cold wind from a cold coast,
a spiteful wind some would say,

a levelling wind that would bring
nothing but broken promises,
the kind they knew all about.

Leaving England in such a sorry state where Lear
might lament, beggars have moved from hedgerows
to streets, the mad are mad again, their lunacy
without care, storms are breaking their high seas
on unprotected headlands and water meadows,
winds whistle and whine like fed up children,
not the time to be four score and foreshortened,
whatever is happening England is back on the heath,
turned out of doors by warring families to dwell
on unintended futures and calamity. ‘Take
physic, pomp’, the tablets are running out,
as the mad lead the blind to the cliff edge, no longer
metaphor, no longer a cultural symposium,
it never was, England cut in pieces again by greed
and pride, nothing comes of nothing like a fee
demanded, the interest compounded as if
there’s always a price for everything, and love
not excepted, the overruled must speak for the ruled,
for it is he wrestling with conscience the poet
puts centre stage as the lightning conductor
of a broken country. Lear is about to die and regret
that surplus and penury were never to meet,
it’s a history we are destined to repeat,
England full of disorders and closing borders,
answers which have tried and fail must try again,
the play warns the ending is not neat.
Death is the curtain but the tragedy is re-enacted,
the players move from generation to generation,
England failing in its treaties, failing its poor,
the young look on while we have wound ourselves
into our winding sheet, we did not save our fields,
nor our seas, nor our birds, nor our beasts,
the harvest spent like dirty money, no credit left.

I Heartlands

They didn’t rise again. Fell away brick by brick.
Already worn they couldn’t stand back to back.

And what came was emptiness. The closed mouths.

And they were kicking nothing about. On the coast
the wind blows sandpapery squalls and on hills
the mist clings to the side of the road. A landscape

of labour done. The heaps grassed over, what was
underground the marches and banners, the battle.

It’s just a wasteland in the eye of the beholder.

Bitterness like the east wind chills to the bone.
Kicked as if they were nothing like old houses
to be pulled down, slate by slate and window

by window, as if marked for listing Category
D for demolition, the relics of Durham.

And when the disease would rise like Anarchy

they knew, the poor blighted villages, that Fraud
had come home to the abandoned heartlands.
And on the pale horse was the Minister for Fear.


II Murton Colliery

on the occasion of the 100th Gala

In the hush of dawn the band plays Gresford
for the loss of men and boys a dying fall.

The workings beneath their feet gave way.

On their banner ‘Each for All’; the chairman
takes off his white cap as a signal.
In the hush of dawn the band plays Gresford.

The ground is riven with promises broken
fallen in faces and abandoned shale.

The workings beneath their feet gave way.

The banner sways on its ropes like a sail
marchers clapped at every gate and door.
In the hush of dawn they hear Gresford.

The future like a sinkhole was to take them all
the Lodge the Union and the pitmen.

The workings beneath their feet gave way.

An ill wind has a shrill declining call
days cut down into smaller pieces.
In the hush of dawn the dying fall of Gresford.

The workings beneath their feet gave way.


III Winds

On the second Saturday of July the bands
enter the waking city, the past enters early

into closed off streets, the drum like a warning,
a mourning drum, villagers come to mourn

their working lives. It’s a refusal to comply.
Outside the County Hotel we hear Gresford.

The banner sways on its ropes like a sail.
This year the Gala will be dumb, struck dumb

as if Plague took pity on their pride and stopped
the masquerade, for how could they come

with banners and music to honour the dead
and comrades? They turned their backs.

Faced the other way. It wasn’t a bitter wind
or unkind. It was the coming of the whirlwind.

The Big Meeting 2020


IV Tides

The sea returning to wash the coal shoreline,
dredges away the slag and shale, a century
of tipping over beaches the waste of the mine,
burnt umber strata in cliffs left behind, the lines
of buckets in constant motion now stopped.
The sea returning each tide for its haul.
The sea carries on its back the great load.

Under the coast the mine is creaking like a sail,

the tunnels buckling, the pit props breaking
under the stress of abandonment, pumps not
pumping, the sealed face with its locked down
coal, the mine is alive with sounds, emptiness
swallowing rock, the pitting of stones, water,
and roads once the haunt of pitmen inbye and
outbye are the property of the earth like a grave.

‘And the actual sun closed
Into what looks like a bible of coal’
Ted Hughes


Colliers all, worked out of sight of the sun.
Under their axes, in tubs, in the seams,

the coal winked its sunlight in the black
countering night under arches propped
at every yard, the only light their headbeams;
the slender shafts pinprick from afar,
from the tunnel’s mouth, merely moving
like fireflies, ahead the low murmuring

of indistinct voices. Buried deep under tides,
they are detonating at the coal face,

in the mine where 13 died in the war safe
from bombs but not from firedamp breeding
deadly fumes, the explosion took them
all, those reading the bible of coal
as it came to hand, the location of text
which says the sun sends its fire laid down

between these rocks, this seam of carbon
packaged for earth. The coal says gifts

come with warnings, nothing is sacred
if taken without attention. There was no
reply from the dead. On these histories
the miners write their bible every time
they honour their own. They are fables
of those below ground digging for sunlight
and the spirit moved in the composer of
Gresford, a Durham miner Robert Saint,

by the fate of two hundred & sixty-six
at the Colliery disaster of that name.
And sacred his music became, the hymn
with a dying fall. For all who reflect
and mark respect, the music holds sunlight
of the lives closed in the bible of coal

and opens the book to read their names.

The ex-coalfield worth a pittance, the winnings all done.
I’m not from here but tears are won for grief of Durham

and the living fire and bread, hearths of community,
the moors and the valleys in unison, bare of industry

passed over for new estates. The Vikings left the land
bloodsoaked and underground the workings by hand

were hard in tight seams, the black death in lungs,
and no one to hear above ground the coughing.

A closed book, the fells wrote a chapter of ghosts
left behind when tents which had landed like a host

of sheltering birds or sudden pitched army were all gone
one morning, the Lead no longer pickings to be won.

Ghosts you can hear whistling for work in the fog,
that was the fate of Coal in the valley, the shut up gob,

in the wilderness of ex-work, ex-miners, ex-Lodge men.
I came to the County at the time of the banner and Union.

The curlew laments on the fells, the seagulls in the valley,
the past with trappings, the spinning wheel like a jenny

carted off to the dump or Museums, not an echo behind,
not a song like Wor Nan’s a Mazer in the sterile helm wind,

in the tongues of the young, they buried it with bitterness
under grass and wild flowers and without a cross.

What stays open is the wound, a flaying of the North East,
the waste washed away daily on the coal coast.

The curlew laments in the fells, the seagulls in the valley.
Black tears of the sand disappear as augury.

What lasts is but a sense of place and displacement.
In the vaults of the hills the lost sentiments.

For the soul of the County, for the mourning of the curlew,
let the silence break its committal, its vow.

For the moortops, for the sea, for seagulls crying in the valley,
let the silence speak, the silence in cages locked away.
I’m far from the kinship of my heartland but near
to the deeper absence of what was once here.

I owe my tears to the way of life of the winnings,
everything that mattered gone in the morning.