Peter Branson

BELIEVE!
2019: bicentennial of The Peterloo Massacre

“Rise, like lions after slumber” – Shelley,
‘The Masque/Mask of Anarchy’, 1819 (first pub.1832)

We meet to talk about low pay,
Our masters own the time.
We swear an oath of secrecy;
That is our only crime.
A living wage, fair shares for all,
For bread and liberty.
Tolpuddle way, we reap and sow;
We will, we will be free.

The mills round here are silenced now;
We import all our clothes
From sweatshops crammed with kids and mums
Where labour costs are low.
A living wage, fair shares for all,
For bread and liberty.
Sing “We are many, they are few”;
We will, we will be free.

They shut down all the steelworks here;
They say we can’t afford.
They argue it’s more sensible
To buy in from abroad.
A living wage, fair shares for all,
For bread and liberty.
We’ll work with nature, not destroy;
We will, we will be free.

When Thatcher plots to close the pits
In nineteen eighty-four,
She’s out to break the unions
And flout our civil law.
A living wage, fair shares for all,
For bread and liberty.
Same health provision, rich and poor;
We will, we will be free.

There’s homeless people, others toil
On zero hours low pay,
Denied the rights we’ve struggled for,
I’m talking now, today.
A living wage, fair shares for all,
For bread and liberty.
So “Shake your chains to earth like dew”;
We will, we will be free.

You Diggers and you Levellers,
Trades unions, Chartists too,
Who fought for hard-won workers’ rights,
Those slain at Peterloo,
A living wage, fair shares for all,
For bread and liberty,
We’re “Children of a wiser day”;
We will, we will be free!

Peter Branson lives in Rode Heath, a village
in South Cheshire. A former English teacher
and lecturer, he now organises writing
workshops. Until recently he was “Writer-
in-residence” for the “All Write” project run
by Stoke-on-Trent Central Libraries.

Gordon Scapens

Sanity Inspector

A sanity inspector calls,
says I’ve scrawled poems
in my head, suspicious statements.

He thinks he can see
my lonely wasted pleading
behind the charade of eyes,

once hoped-for ideals of peace
with nowhere to belong
in the world’s parade.

But he can’t prove anything
without knowing a mask
covers a face of helplessness,

or until he can recognise
the attitude of a man drowning
in his own convictions.

The words are locked away,
doing time in solitary,
like prison inmates

crossing off days
that are bare
on a cell wall,

slowly losing faith.

Widely published over many years in a variety of magazines, journals, anthologies and competitions. Reviews poems for the experience. Lives in a suburb of Preston with his wife, who is friend, critic, muse and editor.

Polly Walshe

Small Talk

As another year turns you realise you could
Fill a party with the dead:
Those you knew well, or half knew
Or used to recognise. You could

Offer them drinks, ask how they are,
Step back and watch them mix. Death
Has been kind to them, you’ll think,
Its chalky angled light shows what they are,

Lends them an innocence, casts
Their features in such sharp relief
They seem to be like angels –
How you’d guess angels are – a cast

Of being light but heavy, real
As only the most urgent prayer.
And they’re already over it,
You’ll overhear, the idea life was real

Instead of the pulsating vacancy
They knew before. Wonderful, they’ll say,
How it came back to them,
Like swimming without motion, a vacancy

One can’t really convey, or flying
Through bubbling blue hyperspace
As time flows down the hill and far away.
It’s so hard to explain. Just say like flying.

Polly Walshe was born in London and currently lives in Oxford. Her poems have recently been published in The Spectator, The Frogmore Papers, Snakeskin and in the Ver Poets prizewinners’ anthology (2020).