NORTH LANARKSHIRE 1992

Lesley Duncan

Poetry Editor

Monday 2 July 2012

A massive redevelopment of the Ravenscraig steelworks site has just been announced.

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Lesley Duncan’s Poem of the Day

I wrote this elegy at the time of the closure 20 years ago.

NORTH LANARKSHIRE 1992

The steel-stripped mills are silenced.

Weeds will sprout from stack and cooling tower.

Rosebay's imperative, outlasting those

Of dreadnought, liner, locomotive,

Will stain the vacant site wine-red,A kind of natural bleeding to relieveThe hurt these ravaged acres suffered.Once this was open countryDipping to the Clyde, admired byTurner, Wordsworth, and their ilk.Then industry had its spoiler's way,First market forces then the StateCondemning generations to relentlessNoise and sweat and filthTo turn inchoate metals into steel.And yet the labour was heroic.Those hard-hatted acolytesWho served the Moloch furnaces,Or tamed the man-made lava's Cooling onrush into slabs,Perceived themselves as comradesIn masculine confederacyAgainst the outside world,As much as economic pawns.Their status and their livelihoods Are now extinguished with the smoke,Their patch of Scotland doubly wronged:To make a puddling groundWhere once larks soaredAnd now through wrecking ofThis noble nightmare of a landscape.

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NORTH LANARKSHIRE 1992

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