Made In Sheffield - Now Then

Unawake.
Talk of the Town.
We’re waking in black and white.
Silvering dawn plates the steel of the room.
Don’t speak.
Open yourself to my dream and I’ll open my dream to you.
The hair on the back of your neck lifts up.
No birds are yet ready to sing.
NOEL WILLIAMS.
How our city has learned to speak:
ballads on buildings, poets in parks.
Streets once silent find they can sing.
Quiet women and men open their hearts.
The city talks from each pavement crack -
“Paradise Lost” found in Paradise Square;
Lady de Winter stalking her garden;
Jane’s passion in a street called Eyre.
A steelworker tempers his villanelle
for a nurse who tends her patient tale.
Whilst children squeal at the storyteller’s zeal,
performance poets rail.
Molten voices flow into the furnace -
verses, violence, grief, love, glory.
Ancient cries melt from modern corners
forging our city-story.
NOEL WILLIAMS.
10am.
In this hour I deem you happy,
seemingly free
from the crags behind your eyes
and the life lines
that litter your face.
Like nobodies toss.
You and I, You and I
grin together. Oh yes, we grin.
As we queue - u e u e
With pitch forks
we poke and grab and stab for what we need
with pennies jangling from our sleeves.
I pick Sausage
for breakfast
with tin beans in mind.
You lugging that beer crate
skip the queue
u e u e - you
Old dog
in blue denim,
fresh from that summer
you never forgot.
It’s a heavy chore I sense,
this demon in you.
Who lends you a happy smile
with seeds of denial
Like no bodies toss.
Brash.
Just as the kid next door swaggers streets
in his skinhead, Nike brand confidence,
just as half of us spend half the time
half compensating for something –
the condor’s ostentatious take-off
or a peacock’s satellite dish plumage,
journos outside the digs of reality show
winners, taking pictures and grubbing
through binned scraps for what might
make headlines fit to wrap up chips in,
the pages of magazines lost to posterity,
just as the names, two years later, linger
on threadbare and hitless internet pages,
I headed off after writing my name in snow
(the field frozen and quiet with no one)
to see the sun rise with a swarm of starlings
and silence that hung as I walked the path
to your door, buzzed and waited, clouds
gathering overhead with their promise of
hail in the short, last days of our December.
BEN WILKINSON.
Ben Wilkinson was born in Stafford in 1985 and now lives
in Sheffield. His poems and reviews have appeared in
publications including Poetry Review, Poetry London, The
London Magazine and the TLS. His first short collections
of poems, The Sparks, was recently published by Talllighthouse
and is available from their website @ talllighthouse.co.uk.
JAMES LOCK.
WORDLIFE.
poetics.
PAGe thirty-seven.