Tim Fellows (British Working Class Poets)

Tim Fellows

 

Tim Fellows is a writer from Chesterfield in Derbyshire whose ideas are heavily influenced by his background in the local coalfields, where industry and nature lived side by side. His first pamphlet "Heritage" was published in 2019. His poetic influences range from Blake to Owen, Causley to Cooper-Clarke and more recently the idea of imagistic poetry and the work of Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez.

 

 

 

The Miner

He used to take the boy for walks
along rutted lanes;
aside thick-grassed fields.
On baked mud tracks
dappled with life and colour
yet close to the grey
man-made towers
and black hills where,
in his daily work,
he would ride the cage
into the darkest hell.
Birds identified
by their song and shape;
He knew the ground
on which we walked
and below which he toiled.
He smiles, in his head the
words and music of Handel.
His hands, holding the boy,
skilled on the trombone,
tending his greenhouse plants,
conducting the choir,
working the coal.

In giving lives and bodies

to the cause - the nation's energy

was safe in the miners' hands

yet they were so much more.

Fathers, brothers, sons, granddads -

Poets, singers, artists, craftsmen;

Hands and hearts

held in perfect time.

Winter by the Lake

In grey rippling water, deep memories
of ice-days, coated black, smoke and steam
billowing in lost skies. 

Men, huddled, dropping into darkness,
raised, emerging, coughing green-black globules
that sat, defiant, on frozen ground.

Nature, stark and cruel, has taken back
a lost empire as fingers of trees claw
in gelid air. It has bided its time.

Patiently snaking into every crevice we made.

Fulfillment Center

After work he liked to walk the muddy paths
around the lake and up the man-made hill.
Survey the scene. The sprawling warehouse
where he earned his pay squatting on land
where once the wheels had spun, conveyors
rolled and great buckets of black rock
were lifted from miles below the ground.

Where his dad and grandad, and his dad before,
had earned their pay. And he had too,
a flash of time before it was all cleared
away, cleansed and sanitized. The days
when he was married, when they worked
in heat and dust, watched each others' backs.
Now he was just a robot with skin and flesh,
waiting to be replaced by one that didn't
need to sleep. That wouldn't feel the wind
at the top of this hill, that had no memories.

One that fulfilled orders and never needed
to be fulfilled.  

 

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Setu, October 2022 :: British Working Class Poets