The Best Part of the Night Shift |
This poem was inspired by this favourite photograph I took of BP Chemicals’ Salt End Works at Hull (where I worked) early one winter’s morning. |
Pink frosted fields aflame, their grass, green-grey, Tinted by the roseate glow of morn - That melting warmth, as breaks another day, And from the eastern bound now leaps the dawn Into a cloudless sky. White wreathèd tracks Of vapour rise and slowly interband The silver spires and slender chimney stacks Which, sentry-like, beside the Humber stand On Salt End’s skyline. Soon the morning moon, Whose crescent gave the western sky its light, Is fugitive before the rising sun And fading, sets, to wait returning night. The jetty, like some giant’s causeway, strides |
On legs of concrete through the muddy stream Towards a ship which at her mooring rides, |
Her superstructure held in golden gleam. Within the Works a hundred tired men, Their night shift over, see the sunrise creep |
Amongst the morning mists, and homeward then They plot their daylit course to welcome sleep. |
© Anthony J. Finn 1995
|
In the Sixties and Seventies, there used to be a |
sign where Thearne Lane joined the Beverley road at |
Thearne, with the above words on it. The poignant |
finality of the wording led me to write a poem about |
it, and what I imagined it to be like. The ferry |
itself closed in 1946, long before I came to live in |
Holderness. |
|
“Wawne Ferry Closed” proclaims the sign |
In white on blue, and on the line |
Below, apologetic, adds |
”permanently” - stark, but sad! |
|
What bureaucratic mind was bent |
To make that closure permanent? |
The passer-by will wait in vain |
To hear the clanking of the chain |
Which pulled the creaking wooden stand |
From bank to bank, upon demand. |
What lovers’ hearts in twain will yearn |
To cross the River Hull to Thearne, |
Now that the closure thus has torn |
Apart the link from there to Wawne? |
|
There’s been no ferry here for ages: |
Long gone are the landing stages. |
Bits of history now, they are, |
Victims of the motor car. |
|
I look again, some five years on; |
I find the sign itself now gone, |
Proclaiming true finality |
By very temporality. |
|
©Anthony J. Finn 1982 |
Poetry |
The Best Part of the Night Shift |
Wawne Ferry Closed - permanently |
|
Ships (from my office window) |
|
A Seafarer's Prayer |
Public Speaking |