She Died Alone

by Mike Jenkins

She died there in hospital,
no husband, Sissy, daughter Ingrid
no church kin around her
and at her funeral of regulation 10
her own Lusamba saw the coffin
and could not imagine her within.

She was a mother to everyone
who was blown into Victoria station
lost for food or direction,
took them home like injured creatures
fed them till they were strong
watched them fly, never to return.

The concourse deserted like Christmas Eve
only without the straggling drunkards
or last-minuters wandering homewards,
when a man cursed and spat hatred
announcing that he had Covid
(though he later tested negative).

She'd worked all hours overtime
to send money home to her mother;
they made her work without PPE
sickness made her vulnerable to disease.
She died alone, the banners remember
outside her station chants of – 'Justice for Belly Mujinga!'

Belly Mujinga was a ticket controller who worked at Victoria station, originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She died on April 5th of Covid-19. She was spat on by a man who claimed he had Covid, though later tested negative. She had been working without PPE. ‘Justice for Belly Mujinga’ was a vital part of recent BLM protests.

To A Different Country

by Mike Jenkins

We were selling tickets
for a journey to a different country
(our own, yet changed totally).
At the station our flags flapped
in a strange wind
stirring from valley to mountain
despite the frosty stillness
of another Monday morning.

‘But it’s the same old train!’
moaned the half-asleep
commuters heading for the city
as they took our leaflets
which explained the way.
‘They’ve only painted it up,
it still runs late
or over-crowded too often.’

The train followed the river down valley
and high up on the stonework
of an old viaduct plinth
someone had painted ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’;
was it the ghost of Meic Stephens
suspended on dragon’s breath?

‘You will arrive on time.
We will build it together.
There is no guarantee,
no money back or return;
but watch it emerge
at the end of the line:
our hands, our imaginations.’

Notes                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    'Cofiwch Dryweryn' means 'Remember Tryweryn'. Over the past year in Wales many people have graffitied this: on walls , rocks, bridges and most recently on an old railway viaduct plinth in the Taff valley. It follows the vandalism of the original one on a rock near Aberystwyth, originally painted by poet and editor Meic Stephens in the 1960s referring to the drowning of a valley and clearance of the village of Capel Celyn, in the Tryweryn valley. See here

Mike Jenkins offers a prose-poem inspired by Martin Hayes’ book of poetry ‘The things our hands once stood for’ 

Those Hands

for Martin Hayes                                    

   I’ll never forget those hands resting on his lap like two sleeping cats till his body was wracked by a coughing fit and they woke and shook disturbed by dreams of slobbering, snarling jaws.

   Those hands knew deep down what I had acquired in studies, courses of rivers and streams black on his palms; while I had merely drawn a map of the Valleys with a shaded area to mean coalfield, like a tainted lung.

   Those hands – the pick ‘n’ shovel of them – had known the obdurate seams, blind tunnels and a dust so dense it seemed a swarm, a plague.

   As he talked they opened up and shone, glowed with his up-down tones which followed the streets down to the nearby park and Nye Bevan museum and back uphill sucking at precious breath.

   As he talked, they played like the kids he’d never had; cats scampering along fence-tops and clawing up bark.

   Such hands you’ll never see again, engrained with stories of his butties, of desperate rescues, of pit-ponies born into dark galleries.

   Those hands had been buried, were a print of carbon; had risen to rub the gentle flames of skin, to a hearth where he sat with his missis coaxing the fire to a high burning.