O is for Orgreave

Battlegrounds where blood ran, bones shattered, skulls crushed, 
where horses charged, batons bludgeoned, boots bruised, 
where lives and hopes were torn like flesh from bone 
 
–	should be places sacred in memory, 
recorded, protected, marked on maps, 
where children learn not the old imperial lie, 
simplicities of rifle butt, jackboot, and flag,
but the complexities, the unending cost of wars lost, 
not won, of wounds unhealed, bitterness 
like acrid cinder scattered on earth. 

June 18th 1984 the day England changed forever,
the descendants of those who Harried the North
crushed resistance, regained their ancestral control. 

Imagine: brutal in its ugliness a coking plant,
rusted its gantries, pipework, storage tanks 
cavernous, blasphemous, poisoning the earth, 
a hell incarnate. Yet it created

white heat to power the furnace
to forge the steel to make the engine, 
to turn the wheel, engage the gear, 
to drive the machine to deliver the pride.

All destined to be cleansed, wiped. 

Driveways of identical homes, each with a Nissan 
neat by a porch and tiny apron of green;
across the road airport-hanger-slick buildings 
contain an Advance Manufacturing Park 
for grandsons of pitmen – perhaps. 

Yet a landscape without memory is a lost place.

On the hill crest a lump of sandstone, smooth carved,
 a miner in his pit gear only his boot soles protruding. 

But where the mounted helmeted cops charged lads
in T-shirts and jeans, wildflowers now grow,
over soil-covered slagheap hawthorns scatter,
larks sing in a clean sky; by the once-polluted River Rother 
a new lake for anglers: Nature the ultimate healer. 

O is for obliteration.

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