Here are three poems collected in conversations and some workshops around Flint Town. This poem was inspired by a photo someone showed me in a cafe, of the Beauty Queen elected in 1956 by the Courtaulds' Factory in Flint (now closed) makers of many fabrics but principally, at that time, rayon. The word threw me back to my childhood:
She sits on a swing,
pretty maids all in a row
around her. Gloved hands grasp
metal ropes. They have
curly hair, lit-up faces.
They laugh. Her hand waves
from the picture, gracious,
regal, like the real Queen.
The maids are clad in, well,
it looks like satin, although it
can’t be. And her dress
(a reflex I cannot help:
mandarin collar, side-zip,
drop-waist, bow on the seam,
dolman-sleeved, tiny buttons on the cuff)
looks like a sprigged brocade. But no,
she must be wearing it, surely.
Rayon. For she is the Rayon Queen.
The word takes me back,
Grandma, mum, big sister,
forever poring over patterns:
Simplicity, Butterick, McCalls;
the Singer Sewing Machine forever
whirring and purring; their boxes of
Sylko cotton-reels and spools
of thread and buttons. The
endless fingering of fabric, the
endless asking, is it cotton? No.
Is it man-made, Bri-Nylon,
Tricel, Polyester? Rayon.
Me, unable to sew, Old-
Nose-in-a-Book, yet gripped
by the drama of Feel, of
Shape. Of Colour. I could say
blue in a dozen different ways
by the time I was
six. Powder, azure, sky,
aquamarine, amethyst,
turquoise sapphire royal
violet indigo. And the war-time
blues. Navy. Air-force.
They are all dead now,
those women, those men,
maybe these girls.
We don’t wear
rayon any more. Only in this
picture of the Queen, and
her laughing ladies, in waiting.
​
And this one came from another photograph in the same cafe, of a couple running a Flint pub in a bygone decade. I was struck by how ill the man looked:
​
Photograph
He occupies half the picture.
Collarless shirt, very white, undone at the neck,
sleeves rolled up,
one tattooed arm at rest on the bar,
the other on the corner of the triple pumps.
Not a well man by the look of him,
something about the eyes.
But he’s smiling. Not many teeth.
Not much hair either. Actually
not a big man,
but saying, I own this,
this is my pub.
In the other half,
his other half,
to one side, slightly behind him.
Right arm right across her bespectacled face
to grip the top of the pump,
as if warding off the terrible blow
she knows will come.
The pumps, shiny brass,
like candlesticks at a funeral.
​
This one was inspired by talking to a woman in Flint Library. She walked with a stick and she said the Library was the furthest she could walk. She had been re-located from her small house in Flint which had been demolished, to a flat in the tower block known as The Heights. She liked the view but told me she missed her garden, and why:
​
The Heights
Seven floors up,
she peers through
glass.
Sunrise. A
wide sky,
whirling sea-birds,
estuary far below.
She pinpoints with her
tiny eye, barges,
fishing boats.
She cannot identify
these birds. They are just
movements of
white wings in
space. Or
tiny black scratches
on grey steel.
She remembers her garden,
bird-feeders in a tree,
stripes and spots and
soft chests, colours
close up, startling.
Greenfinch. Nuthatch.
Woodpecker.
Still, now she has the whole sky.
The view holds her suspended.
The birds cry and call.