1.Pain of parting

Skywards thrusting still,

Black chimneys stand –

Mute monuments of pain endured

A pain not of their working

But of their passing,

When all that seemed

So strong, so sure,

So part of homeland,

In pieces lay before them.

When those who held the reins

In distant shires,

Discarded thought for fellow man

And at a stroke of pen

Destroyed a way of life

Begun by ancient man,

And where once all was life

Where smell of steam and smoke

Filled every part of earth and sky,

A silence fell,

Destructive in its power.

A price was paid …

But not by those who

Wealth and distance set apart,

And, Pilate-like,

Have washed their hands

And gone to ventures new.

But who has borne the cost?

This price that must be paid?

From humble home the ransom comes,

In human form,

As fathers wrenched from hearths held dear

Depart to lands unknown

With fear and pain of parting.

In hardship unimagined,

They toiled and sweat and cried,

To push aside adversity

And build a life,

That far from home,

Embraced and held them close

To all that they held dear.

A spirit strong as that endures

And down the ages surges

Through blood of those who follow,

And though the flesh of those

Who went with pain of parting,

Now joins, as one,

With soil of foreign field,

Their children’s children come

To bind together old and new,

To stand where stood their kin of old,

The touch again that ancient land.

So for the soul the circles closes

And comes to rest,

Its journey done.

2. Redruth Railway station at night.

Clock creeps to midnight

Soft sleep its gentle hostage takes

Throughout the tired town.

But there, where arc of bridge

Throws high its granite span

The day hangs on.

As lamps cast pools of light

On platform cold and grey,

Where parting people stand

Islands in the dark,

Cocooned and swathed

Against November chill

That comes as east wind tips

Down Carn Brea’s top,

And coldness grips the town.

A place of passage

A place to feel

That final hold on home

And hope for exile brief, 

That fortune’s smile will hold

The hope of quick return.

They do not know

But bonds are sundered here

That never forge again

And as they go

The life-blood, too,

Goes from our land.

This place has felt the pain

In former days,

When from the west

They came to wait

In huddled hordes.

Bereft of work, of hope,

A land where silent shafts

Send messages of lives destroyed

And forced to leave this land.

Caught in camera’s eye,

That sea of anxious faces,

Flung platform long

In quiet confusion,

Speaks the pain of parting,

The aching want of home.

Those faces full of fear

Of unknown lands.

Stood here so late

On lonely night

When winds of time blow chill

I see them still.