GRANDAD AND A PRAMLOAD OF CLOCKS by John Lindley
Wheeling them in,
the yard gate at half-mast
with its ticking hinge,
the tin bucket with a hairnet of webs,
the privy door ajar,
the path gloved with moss
ploughed by metal
through a scalped tyre -
in the shadows of the hood,
in the ripped silk
of the rocking, buckled pram,
none of the dead clocks moving.

And carrying them in
to a kitchen table,
a near-lifetime’s Woodies
coating each cough,
he will tickle them awake;
will hold like primitive headphones
the tinkling shells to each ear,
select and apply unfailingly
the right tool to the right cog
and with movements
as unpredictable as the pram’s
will wind and counter-wind
the scrap to metronomic life.

And at the pub,
at the Grey Horse or Houldsworth,
furtive as unpaid tax,
Rolex and Timex
and brands beneath naming
will change hands for the price of a bevy,
a fish supper
or a down payment
on early retirement
on a horse called Clockwork
running in the three-thirty at Aintree.

"THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS"
by Wendell Berry

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

sunfolk - Where have you been? That poem captures perfectly
Berry's anxiety and recourse to attain calm once again.
The wild things he encounters - the heron, the wood drake don't give
thought to the stresses of life. The stillness and beauty of nature
restores his balance. Nature is his salve to cope with life's trials.
I totally agree with yoro42 - excellent choice - thank you!

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life:
it goes on."
- Robert Frost

Ticking Boxes.

The boxes are ticked by those men who’ve been picked from the
keenest of yes men there, for checks done each day
so the bosses can say that their workforce takes extra
care.
But the bosses were tricked by some men that
they picked for a job that all liars can do, composing
old fiction that begs a conviction for writing what
still isn’t true.
For on they run with boxes ticked,
while welding’s cracked and something’s dripped
inside the cell, where foremen looked for hours on
end, in logs and books, recording all the names of
crooks, who wouldn’t see and didn’t look behind
those windows two feet thick, where fell a steady
drip of ticks.
Soon crystals formed as crystals do,
from tiny holes where pressure grew a mist of
droplets spewing out, a sign that should have
brought a shout from foremen ticking thrice each
day, when signing names for easy pay, the country
paying bigger lumps to lazy men for growing dumps.
Some columns formed with lost control, as foremen
ticked and shirkers stole, five minutes here then
hours there, forsaking safety’s measured stare for
extra tea and flashy things that overtime some boxes
bring, with elements whose mass can change the
genes of everything in range.
Trapped outside their ticking box,
where spillage flows like molten rocks,
with dangers left to grow unseen until one idle
chargehand’s scream says ‘Shut it down and do it
quick, before we’re all in deeper sh_t’. There’s been
another situation,
critical to every nation.”


Duncan - A former Sellafield Foreman who died 2009 of a radiation linked disease.

http://www.yorkshireman-photography.co.uk/images/wastwaterfromgreatgable.jpg

4 million gallons imperial per day can be taken from wast water for Sellafield
Sellafield is just behind the hills on the right between there and the sea

You see the Mountains on the left....
http://www.theglobalthermometer.com/wcg/cockcroftlarge.jpg


nothing else stirs such fury in me
such fury that I have to be silent