COMING INTO MANCHESTER
The city is a collage. You look back,
The station’s shiny sinuous S-curve glints
An avant-garde triumphant in the sun
Avant-la-lettre architecturally,
Abstract, except the banks of glittering scales
Of windows seeming to wriggle towards
You; then a blackened mill, a viaduct,
Converted warehouse, public house, a bank
From what was once the Florence of the North,
Its civic buildings in a classic style
Once shaded charcoal grey by chimney smoke,
The columns, porticos and tympani
On banks and credit institutions, most
Names now defunct, absorbed by new players on
The block, the public library circular
In shape, its steps leading to Peter’s Fields
Where tipsy yeomanry once charged at crowds
Protesting peacefully about the need
For parliamentary reform – the vote –
This after years of lack of work and bread
Brought all surrounding mill towns to a stop,
With shadows on the cobbled streets and slate
Roofs capping figures looking gaunt and stark
Who came out in their Sunday best only
To see it decorated with the blood
Of those cut down by indiscriminate
Sabres, the dead eighteen and hundreds more
Maimed, injured, women and children in the toll.
I look down from the library steps and see
And feel the carnage visited upon
The working poor or poor because of need
Of work in Bury, Bolton, Oldham who
Had walked there in their Sunday best to hear
The radical speaker Henry Hunt perform.
If Manchester is difficult to see
Without its history, it paved the way
For what we have to today in highlighting
The need for work and dignity, for care
And overall political reform.
The city is a collage, cut up, put
Together in the mind from patches, past
And present, images and photographs
And print of memories not to forget.
