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Home Blog Arts Hub

The Cut

The Cut

8 July 2026 /Posted byRoger Cornish
Post Views: 440
Cokeley Bridge, crossing The Cut, Source: Wikipedia

By Roger Cornish

They’ve about emptied ya
out now boy

A thousand bicycles
a robbed safe
hundreds of shopping trolleys
the odd suicide

You flow on
no more factory dye and chemicals
the
Coal’s gone too
and you flow

All the way to London
that’s why they call you ‘Grand’?
Unadulterated your fish grow
Strong

I remember when the one-armed man swam from
bridge to bridge covered
in a pink grease with his odd circular swim like a
whirling dervish

I caught a fish in you once
A roach three inches long
I wondered how he survived
How we all survived
With those hooks
In our mouths

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England is A Knife
ANTS

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About Author

Roger Cornish

Roger Cornish was born the fifth of seven children to Coal Miner – Jack Cornish and Hosiery Worker Edna Cornish. He worked as a Coal Miner for 23 years. His dad was also a miner. Roger started writing poetry as a kind of 'therapy' after losing his daughter aged 9 to Cystic Fibrosis. Now retired, he spends his time on his allotment and writing poetry. Roger writes about desire, camaraderie, grief, class, faith lost and faith of a different kind found. He writes about what men do to women and what women survive. He writes about the mines as a place of brotherhood and danger and profound meaning. He writes about a Leicestershire that has largely disappeared — the back-to-backs, the pit wheels, the communities unmade by political decisions taken far away by people who had never gone underground.

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