POEM OF THE WEEK

A dozen iron horses along the trainline from Birmingham to Wolverhampton – sculptures by Kevin Atherton – inspired this new poem by Liz Berry, written in the dialect of her Black Country “wum” (home). Its bridal parties and railway rhythms recall The Whitsun Weddings by Larkin. Tristram Fane Saunders

IRON OSS

Iron osses, little wenches of the

sidings, watch over us on our passings, our wum-comings;

through the Smethwicks, factories

laploved and tumbled, the trollied cut with its rainbow of

sump-oil

and behind overgrown buddleia,

banqueting halls fizzing like bottles of pop on Friday

afternoon

with stunned new brides and

bhangra-armed grooms, for love is a journey to an unknown

station.

Pit-bank wenches, run alongside us,

through Rolfe Street and Galton Bridge, Sandwell and Dudley

where the bones of tough-work sink

secret as fossils beneath the edgelands’ new greenery.

Watch over babbies dozing as their

moms dream of nights lost cantering in long grass,

watch over the wenches laughing in

their gorgeous make-up, off into the new life or just off

chapping-it.

Watch over Sam solving six down

for Leila from Stafford,

Magda on the early shift, Mrs

Begum alighting

for HMP Featherstone. And as we

pass, drum your hooves for Sharon Ann Academy of Dance

and Cheer

a sparkler of joy in the trading

estate’s gloom; for the blokes in the breakers yard,

smoking in the rain;

the old boys downing Banks’s in

half-cut pubs, wammels lost to the nettled heaven

of the allotments.

Watch over us all, little osses, for

some days it feels life is nothing but travelling,

waving goodbye

to all we know, never quite certain

of who we leave and who we carry within us like

tender luggage.

Watch over those who have long gone, taken the dawn train on a one-way ticket,

and those not born yet, sweet

unseen passengers still held in the darkness, waiting for

the signal,

the green light and the whistle to call them into that first bright

station of their lives.