Ditch

Under the scruffy hawthorn –
Dog-eared and tatty,
Dog-sniffed yet brooding –
The ditch runs;
Only a whip of thorns
Protecting it from wandering eyes.
The ditch;
A man-made beck
That beckons to nothing
But flash-flood over-spill
And tsunami waves
From lorry tyres
Smashing and thrashing
Their pyrrhic victories
Against road-edge puddles.

Yet they are there.

These ditches.
These long lines of art
Where man and nature
Worked together;
A partnership,
For once,
That worked for both.

Were they made for the roads?
Steel armed navvies,
Armies of shovels
Digging in unison.
The last spike in
Finishing the turnpike?

Were they made for the fields?
Farmhands and hired hands,
Sludge-trudging;
Stopping root rot
Or building a floss
To turn the stone of the mill?

Each was made
With salt-soaked brow,
And blistering toil;
With nicked-fingers,
And aching backs
With rough handled hoes
And hand-me-down trenching spades
Under warm July skies
Zipping with insects,
Skies now painted in sepia –
But were bright and true.

Who dug the ditches?
Their faces, lost to us;
But their work,
Their art – of
These unsung rivers –
Is their story, living still.

They dug the ditches deep back then;
They had to –
Beating back the boundaries
Of nature’s millennia
Never had an adze or briar hook been seen
Until then.

Narrow blades; course hammered,
Drain spades and trench shovels
Lugged and bent
Where the shaft hooked the housing;
Sure footing for the sure-footed boot
To stand on, force, rend, cut.

The Navvy’s forebears,
Local stock, not travelled,
Except by foot or ox cart
Descended like bloody midges, swarming
To the Mop Fairs, hiring out blistered hands,
For work, for women, for wealth.

And they broke –
Broke the turf-sods and clod-soil,
Broke the rootstock and tap shoots,
Broke, with badging tools and sickle-scythes;
Broke, with froes and beet hooks;
Broke their backs for coppered toil.

These days, we dig and cover –
The shovel-scoop of the iron ox forces, rends and cuts
The drains, grey tubes, flushing, free –
But look close,
Where the litter lies in the old hedge line
Where the soft mud gathers, draped in half-mulched leaves –

There, lie the shallow trenches
There, the mark of the old ditch diggers
Cruddy trickles;
Chip wrappers, rusting beer cans
Their memoriam;
Their last will, their testament.

Tag: Ditch

Who dug the ditches?

Ditch Diggers