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Mark Hale
I was born and raised in Ellesmere Port. When I was 10, in 1973, I helped out a few times when they started to clear and re-open what is now known as the Boat Museum. Being from a town built up around docks/ports/waterways has always held a fascination for me.
With regards to my poem I have tried to paint a picture, I found it really difficult, chopping and changing what I had written. Although I found the experience really enjoyable. I do not profess that it is anything special but just a commentary on the way of life that moulded Ellesmere Port in the very early days. I hope it makes sense and that you enjoy what I have done.
Iron Giants
Telford opened up our lives
From four corners of the kingdom
An invasion of tonnage and smoke
Constant chugging filling air and lungs
Bringing to Port, the cargo of life
Navigating arteries with their wares
They rise and fall majestically in the locks
Ebb and flow is a constant companion
Routes see landscapes drift silently past
Family huddle in the heartbeat of the vessel
China plates sit proudly with delicate lace
Coal dust hangs on every word
Grubby children top and tail, happy
Brasses glinting, blinding the sun
All seasons are met with castles and roses
Vibrant colours so rich, they seep inwards
Father to son, continue the voyage
Magnetic lure of the water tempts these steel hulks
Voyaging ahead, weathered faces look
As childlike waves chase each other.
IdentityPerhaps flat Manc’ vowels
bubble beneath the surface of the Ship Canal,
Belfast brogue filters through the estuary,
Brum comes up from the ‘Shroppie’
and hard Scouse consonants
wash from The Mersey as silt
but here it’s all rinsed into something other –
other than even Birkenhead and Bebington,
Chester and Childer.
A speech born in marl,
fashioned in clay,
caked in coal,
greased by oil
and smelted as ore
speaks of its birthday –
remembers the stove pipe hats,
the high timbered ships,
the knuckles and spades
that cut the link from the Mersey to the Dee,
that dug for an idea
and uncovered an identity
and what was river speak, sea talk,
Northern dialect and Cheshire tongue
is now an accent blasted from phenol
and buffed by a bar of three-penny soap
into the lyric of the land,
the lilt of the sea,
the patter of the Port.
Written for Ellesmere Port & Neston Borough Council’s ‘Fusion’ project, ‘Our Town’.
The Port
Jigsaw of warehouses
toll booth
locks
moorings
knot of salt sea
estuary
navvy built waterways
heart, hub
pumping goods
providing, feeding
fuelling vital organs
sliding, easing
pulsing through
arteries and veins
pea-beans, rock salt
chocolate crumb
to Bourneville
grain to Kellogg’s
cargoes of wheat
for cake master, Conquest
Bransome or Cobbetts
iron brackets
gutters and fixings
clay for the Potteries
cotton, coal, tar
ammonia-water
fever of chatter
bustle
clash of anvil
hammer thud
clamour
hollering
calling
caulker's oakum
tightening
the stomach
of the Starvationer
braced for a load
from Bridgewater's
mines
the boatman
scans tardy stars
moon not yet waned
bairns still curled
top to tail
in the cabin
like kittens in a nest
he shoulders past
neighbours
in box boats
Mersey Flats
his craft
rippling
working water
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