Barry Dock Station by Geraldus John

When did it start?

The frantic distortion of silence,
Trucks rattling towards dismal tramps
Resounding their thuds, day and night,
When tipped by hoists into hungry holds.
The shore became a wasteland, a stranger
Shrouded in the silence of black fog,
While through a lung clogging blackness
Drizzled a pervading darkness of grey rain.

That was the start of it.

From the wasteland soared distinct voices,
Not mystical tones from heavenly spheres,
But the dry moans of rusted shackles
Wrestling to sustain restless colliers,
And orchestrated with perverted constancy
By the entrapped groans of tired bodies.
Above the wasteland, Dock View Road
Played a scene of abrupt human dispersal.
Urged by the siren’s martial call,
A thousand men, grimy with sweat,
Escaped their personal Tartarus.
A human deluge seeking brief refuge
Swept all before it. Mothers and children
Scattered and ceded the street
To the ebb and flow of a good natured tide
Of exuberant humanity.
Dock View road held its breath and awaited,
With patience, the next martial call.
In the hour, the siren again played its dreary note
To shatter the calm of short won silence.
Regretful of the sad wailing of time lost,
The slide of coal continued to the pier.
A Mahlerian symphony of metallic phonics,
Anguished, but completely compelling.
Dock View road again held its breath
And awaited with patience the next martial call.

Will there be an end to it?

Barry dock station now in silence sits
Embedded in a deserted scrubland
Built from the destruction of the past.
Once the proud centre of frenzied activity
Buffeted by the movement of coal,
It proffered a service for seafarers,
To travel home from a myriad destinations,
But was also venue of a thousand trades
Where all things had their price.
Today, diesels trundle lonely tracks
To halt at the little shed to hear
Traffic murmuring and gulls calling,
With little else to remind us of the bold past.

This is the end of it!