PUBLIC EXECUTION
Sevastopol Street is choked with cars. On Inkerman they wait for door-step milk and blinkered horse. These Lowry neighbours once rose to furnace red dawn dayglow silk.
They spent their lifetimes stoking, coking, underneath perpetual smoking lips that kissed on Saturdays the Spion Kop, eclipsing corner shops, defiling half-time peas and chips.
Tied to the town by hammer blows and duty bound, each generation sweated where the bellows blew until, with nothing more to give, today a brass band’s captive clamour climbs the hollow flue.
No scaffold speech, no axe, no sword, but charges laid and synchronised. Remote, the giant stumbles, bending at his knees to a sudden flapping of birds wings, and a sighing from his
