Orgreave after Guernica, by Bob Olley
I wouldn’t go back I should have but I couldn’t.
It wasn’t an end but a beginning.
At Nantgarw the black Taff swelled with strikers’ blood,
A flood engorged by denying the women and children,
Denying their benefits in that black swell,
The river, relentless, floating with spectral families.
Go to the Valley Shim, my true love said,
I lay on a mattress in Newport, a landline ringing out,
You have to answer, and answer I will,
They need you to speak,
But I was choked on family allowance books,
And a year of the trail of tears.
It wasn’t rolling news in those days,
Everything was a lie and we knew it,
Staunch in providing food,
As cops waved wads at famished families.
It was just scratchy black and white epoch TV,
Like when the cops busted Scargill.
At the Heads of the Valley the return began,
I remember the crescent moon,
But it was dawn and a hideous wind,
It was always a bit grey but that day,
The Gods turned against us,
All I heard was Jerusalem in Treorchy.
It was a re-enactment from that Bergman film,
Where the corpses enter a plague village,
Across a barren landscape to a village,
A sort of place, like Aberdare that Christmas,
With effigies of freedom,
Blind pilgrims seeking sanctuary under the law.
Then the landline rang again but I let it ring out,
A striker’s head under a cudgel,
A scab truck running over young lads to dirt sleep
The replay of the English Civil Wars,
Useless violence under reasonableness,
Where we see horses goaded to deliver.
Our union, the union, reduced to the tendril dregs,
Now sitting in a pub where Malcom X was denied,
The police riot, that rampage of horror,
But there is no end, no beginning, just now.
The phone rang out but I was in Senghenydd
As bonfire night ashes flowed with the Capital dead,
We’ll take the fire damp to the deep amnesiac sea.
by James O’Brien
