#millom

Millom - Bangers font and Photography  by Johanna

Hello-Artmageddon is now on Facebook    

Hello-Artmageddon stands for the use of Arts as an alternative to solve conflicts around the world. Do you like something? Share it with the world.

Millom Old Quarry

‘They dug ten streets from that there hole,’ he said, ‘Hard on five hundred houses.’ He nodded Down the set of the quarry and spat in the water Making a moorhen cock her head As if a fish had leaped. ‘Half the new town ‘Came out of yonder – King Street, Queen Street, all ‘The houses round the Green as far as the slagbank, ‘And Market Street, too, from the Crown allotments ‘Up to the Station Yard.’ – ‘But Market Street’s ‘Brown freestone’, I said. ‘Nobbut the facings ‘We called them the Khaki Houses in the Boer War ‘But they’re Cumberland slate at the back.’

I thought of those streets still bearing their royal names Like the coat-of-arms on a child’s Jubilee Mug – Nonconformist gables sanded with sun Or branded with burning creeper; a smoke of lilac Between the blue roofs of closet and coal-house; So much that woman’s blood gave sense and shape to Hacked from this dynamited combe. The rocks cracked to the pond, and hawthorns fell In waterfalls of blossom. Shed petals Patterned the scum like studs on the sole of a boot And stiff-legged sparrows skid down screes of gravel.

I saw the town’s black generations Packed in their caves of rock, as mussel or limpet Washed by the tidal sky; then swept, shovelled Back in the quarry again, a landslip of lintels Blocking the gape of the tarn. The quick turf pushed a green tarpaulin over All that was mortal in five thousand lives. Nor did it seem a paradox to one Who held quarry and query, turf and town In the small lock of a recording brain.

Norman Nicholson