Cotton Mills Poem by C Richard Miles

Clatter of shuttle and rattle of looms
Shattered the peace of the weaving rooms
In Yorkshire and Lancashire’s high rolling hills,
Where masses of mill lasses chattered in mills
Tripping and clopping in crude wooden clogs
Under the fast-running drive-belts and cogs
Which powered machinery, oily and rough,
Manufacturing worsted and cotton and cloth.

Yet the beckoning fingers of time draw me back
To explore once again where the smoke billowed black
From towering chimneys, in days long-since gone
When millworkers hustled and bustled along
To clock in each morning for a pittance of pay
To work uncomplaining, so far from today
Where whiz-kids in cities dash past, crushed by rush
But mills are now stilled in an ear-splitting hush.

And no bobbins and spindles and shuttles are left
Where weavers once tended the warp and the weft
To fettle to fabric with fine-spun thin threads
But axes have fallen and silenced the sheds
And only the bleat of the sheep on the hills
Gives a musical beat to the crumbling mills
And the tumbling becks from each steep-sided dale
Add their echoing whispers as memories fail.