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 | Yorkshire Times A Voice of the Free Press |
Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
12:00 AM 14th June 2025
arts
Poem Of The Week: Brass By Ralph Dartford
Brass
For us, there were journeys of fine weather between
the walled towns. But now, it rains inside our trains.
Once, our days and nights tapped out hot rhythms
as we danced mambas drenched in salted sweat –
dipped our dreams with blistered fingers –
raised life’s hopes to the turncoat wind.
In teatime kitchens, our chips drowned in gravy
and nothing of comfort’s good came calling.
These streets have been forsaken by forensics –
the small price of power’s broken bicycle.
Hills are now histories. No miners. No steel
as we live a slag-heap northern slander.
Twice and thrice, that ‘us’ has become
hopeless, hapless and ice cold homespun.
Yes. We live in the walled towns
where the red flag frays flaccid.
Where our brass bands
have stopped carousing.
For us, there were journeys of fine weather between
the walled towns. But now, it rains inside our trains.
Once, our days and nights tapped out hot rhythms
as we danced mambas drenched in salted sweat –
dipped our dreams with blistered fingers –
raised life’s hopes to the turncoat wind.
In teatime kitchens, our chips drowned in gravy
and nothing of comfort’s good came calling.
These streets have been forsaken by forensics –
the small price of power’s broken bicycle.
Hills are now histories. No miners. No steel
as we live a slag-heap northern slander.
Twice and thrice, that ‘us’ has become
hopeless, hapless and ice cold homespun.
Yes. We live in the walled towns
where the red flag frays flaccid.
Where our brass bands
have stopped carousing.
A parody of its former cohesion, the de-industrialised terrain of the North is a study in alienation and division, a ‘slanderous’ insult to its earlier social purpose. In a battery of alliterative cogency, Dartford’s narrator mocks not the collective ‘us’ of the close-knit pit towns but rather, the architects of decline and the language of economic consequence: ‘hopeless, hapless and ice-cold homespun’.
Dartford’s new landscape is sterile, devoid of warmth, a ghostly shadow-play of the vitality, the ‘hot rhythms’ and comforts of memory. The poem’s title, ‘Brass’, is double-edged in the context of a time of cataclysmic change: a reference both to the brass band, that great symbol of unity in mining districts, and to its cultural obverse, the greed and self-interest that throve, continues to thrive, in the monied hinterland of the City.
‘Brass’ is taken from House Anthems, published by Valley Press, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.
More information here: https://www.valleypressuk.com/shop/p/house-anthems