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POWER
STATION
The
night shift’s coming off. The
sky is brown.
A
little man in a large overcoat
looks
up and breathes, forgets he need not frown
at
any glare, stabbing at eyes and throat,
from
furnaces. He stubs a
cigarette
and
tries to whistle, feeling for the note,
then
goes off through the winter, getting wet.
The
day shift comes, merging as if by whim,
to
generate a power they’ll never get.
Light
shunts from raw to the best side of grim.
Fed
with a hopeful curse or two the sky
banks
its rude fires to a sullen brim.
Smoke
spoils the vision like a breaking stye.
The
light creeps through, the side-streets take their ration.
Mean
roofs absorb it, meanly littered by
this
hub of industry, not out of fashion.
So
little light! But pity’s
act needs less,
dark
consummation amid dirt’s excess
where
many lost cross at the heart of Passion.
Alan
Marshfield
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