Ingrow Mills Poem by C Richard Miles

Gelled fast by grease-lank lanolin from lambswool
Stand eyeless skeletons clawed back from death throes.
Bare bones of blood-red brick and black soot.
Stripped, glassless mills slink stark in Ingrow.

These throng-less halls, which one held thousands
In industrial prime who sweat-spun rank skeins
Into coarse-slubbed shoddy, or dense worsted,
Simply stall and draw the smoke-grey sky in.

They shall not long rest roofless, sacked and empty:
Developers draw dark arcane design-drafts
Which convert, to chic sleek city crash-pads,
Sheds that heard rough shouts of low-class workers;

And when the smug-smile upstart middle classes
Move in with their swish foreign-spun garments,
Will these walls feel shaken, shamed to silence
That they cannot now themselves supply them?